Anywhere But Here (38 page)

“It’s going to be the next
Hair,”
my mother whispered.

They planned to perform around the country in mushroom
shaped tents, with seating for five hundred. My mother wrote out a check. I tried to stop her but she was excited. It scared me a little, her attraction to them. She wouldn’t have wanted me to be like that.

Daniel and I sat together on the piano bench. Daniel had studied piano for eight years and then quit. The whole reason the Witch liked me was that I somehow got Daniel to practice. The living room was cold. I’d never taken piano or any instrument in my life and my fingers didn’t know where to go. Daniel was trying to teach me. He’d played three or four pieces through, after sorting out the dusty stack of music under the piano bench, slapping the books against his thigh.

Then he played this piece. I made him stop. I loved the melody. It made me think of something in nature. This was the piece I wanted to learn.

Daniel wanted to teach me so we could play it together. But it was really hard. We hadn’t gotten three bars down yet. My fingers seemed to have no memory. We went over and over the same nine notes, going as far as we could until I made a mistake, but I never got tired of it, because I loved hearing the melody, even a piece of it, every time. I liked to think I was learning how to do something, improving myself. Then I saw my mother’s white car pull up outside the front window. She got out, pushed her hair back with both hands and ran to the door. We slipped off the bench and walked to the kitchen, passing Riley. Then we heard the sound of a rough scale. Riley was beginning to take lessons. He wanted to start a rock band when he was eighteen.

In the kitchen, our mothers each had their hands in a plastic bag of dates. “Mmmm,” my mother was saying.

“Adele, I have to take you down there. They’re so cheap. Don’t you think they’d make a nice present, in some kind of basket?”

“With a bow. Absolutely.”

“I have so many clients. And they all have to be Christmased.”

My mother touched my hair and kissed me. “Hi, Darling.”

“You’re lucky she lets you kiss. I wouldn’t dare touch Daniel, would I?”

Daniel shrieked and ran around the counter. “Ouch! Stay away from me, Witch!”

“So, Adele, Ann tells us you ski.”

“Well, mmhmm, we really haven’t here. To tell the truth, I’m a little scared of skiing on this western snow. They say it’s different.”

The Witch pulled up another plastic bag of dates for my mother to sample. Daniel and I snuck out. They’d talk awhile. We still had time. “To tell the truth,” my mother was saying again, as we skidded through the dining room on just our socks.

But she didn’t tell the truth. To my mother, Cassie Swan wasn’t the Witch, she was a woman who lived north of Sunset on San Ysidro Drive and so my mother was all dull formality. My mother wasn’t scared of western snow. It was money. It was always money.

Daniel said, Move over, and Riley looked at us, over his hornrimmed glasses that were too big for his face, and kept on with his scales. “Come on,” Daniel said. Then finally, he shoved Riley off onto the floor, clearing the piano bench for me. I saw Riley’s face for a moment when he fell, he looked up at me, it was awful, something I never forgot. Then, a minute later, on the floor, he did a back somersault, and landed, smiling goofy again, all charm.

Both mothers walked in to watch. They each slid one foot out of one high heel.

“Isn’t that great?” my mother said.

“Daniel could be so good if he’d only practice. If he’d only once stick to something.”

“Oh, he should, he’s obviously talented. Obviously.”

“I wish he’d listen to you.”

Under the piano, Riley bent over, pounding away at the tiles like a keyboard, with his genius for mimicry.

At the cake sale my mother fell in love.

“Did you see when we walked down the hall and he walked down the hall?” I was carrying the square marble cake we’d bought and my mother kept elbowing me in the ribs.

“I looked and I saw this HANDsome man, I mean, boy, is HE good-looking, I mean REALLY, and I thought, Hey, he’s not with another woman, he’s here alone. He must be divorced or even a widower. I’ll bet a widower, the way he walked with his head down. And every few minutes I’d be walking along and he’d sort of look at me, like, Hey, who’s she? And I’d sort of look at him and he’d look at me and sort of smile, you know. So then, we were both in front of your cake—say, wasn’t that something, a hundred dollars. You should be proud. You and Daniel should both be proud—”

My mother unlocked my door. “Oh, Honey, do we really want to put that gooey thing in our nice car? Let’s not, Ann. Really. Why don’t you run over and throw it in the trash. There’s a can. Nobody’s going to know and I can just see if I have to brake, it’ll be all over the leather. And that’ll never come out.”

“I’ll hold it on my lap.”

“Honey, just throw it out. We can go get ice cream cones if you’re hungry for a little something sweet, but I don’t want that messy thing in my car. I’m sorry, Ann, but I just can’t. I’m not. I have to keep this car nice.”

I crossed the street and dumped the cake in a garbage can. It was a good cake, it smelled like mint. A girl named Isabel had made it and her cakes had a reputation for being messy, but good. She used liqueurs in her batter.

“We paid seven dollars for that,” I said, when I sat down in the car.

“Oh, Honey, the money’s for the school really, not for the cake. Ooops.” She braked as a man holding a child’s hand walked in front of the car. She was always a distracted driver. “Tell you what. Let’s go get ice cream cones. That’s better for us anyway.”

“I don’t want ice cream.”

“Well, I think I could go for one. Anyway. Where was I? Oh, in front of your big galaxy. I was standing and he was standing, but not saying anything. And that’s when you came up with your friend, and she said, ‘Oh, Ann, this is my father, Dr. Spritzer’—that’s interesting, isn’t it, that she said Dr. Spritzer, not just my
dad, she must be real proud of him, obviously. You know, Hon, you should really introduce me as Dr. Adele August in situations like that.”

“You’re not a doctor.”

“I am. I have honorary PhDs from a couple of places.”

“Where? I’ve never seen them.”

She sighed, steering with two fingers. “I don’t know, packed somewhere. Maybe at Gramma’s. I really have to get all my things organized. But anyway, it doesn’t matter, because you were real cute the way you said it anyway, real nonchalant, just, ‘This is my mom.’ Really, you did it just right.”

“I’m relieved.”

“And boy, did HE look then. ‘Oh, what kind of doctor are you?’ I said, but just real casual.”

I’d heard all this—I’d been standing right there, but you couldn’t stop her once she’d started. I looked at houses out my window as we drove.

“And when he said, ‘Orthodontist,’ I said, ‘Really. That’s funny, because I’ve been looking for an orthodontist to see if Ann’s going to need braces.’ Remember, Hon, how you came home your first day and said the girls told you you needed braces? It’s a good thing they did. Lucky.”

Right there, in front of our cake, Dr. Spritzer had leaned over, taken my head in his hands and opened my mouth. He had doctor’s hands. While he held my head, I felt like sleeping.

“Yup, I’m afraid she will,” he had said. “She’s got some pretty big toofers in that little mouth.”

I thought he and my mother should get along. They both used the same dopey slang.

“So, did you hear when he said, ‘Bring her in anytime and we’ll see what we can do’? And then he sort of winked at me. Real subtle. Sort of half a wink. I suppose he didn’t want you kids to see. So. We’ll just have to wait. But I think in a week or two I’ll call his office and see about braces for my little Bear Cub.”

She reached over and patted my knee and I stiffened. She parked in front of Baskin-Robbins.

“You really don’t want one? Just a single dip.”

“No.”

She held out money to me. “Well, I’d like a double, the top scoop chocolate almond, the bottom, pistachio. On a sugar cone.”

I just sat there.

“Come on, Honey. Just run in and do this one thing for me. After all I do for you. Go on.” She pressed the money into my hand.

In the two weeks before the appointment, we dieted. We ate salads at Hamburger Hamlet for dinner and my mother gave up ice cream altogether. The Saturday before the appointment, we went shopping on Rodeo Drive. In one of the dressing rooms, a room that was so big and pretty we could have lived in it, my mother sat down on the love seat and cried, quietly, so the salesgirls hovering in the hallway wouldn’t hear. She lifted the beige ticket from the sleeve of a suit she was trying on. It cost seventeen hundred dollars.

“Well, so why don’t we go somewhere else?”

“There is nowhere else.” She shook her head, unzipped the skirt and began to step out of it. She looked ruefully around the room, glancing at herself from different angles in the mirrors, flexing and arching her foot. She looked over her shoulder at the backs of her thighs. Then she sucked in her cheeks.

“I’m pretty, but that’s not enough. Nobody wants a woman my age who doesn’t dress.”

“I thought he liked you. You said he winked.”

“Well, he saw me in the yellow. He only saw me in my best thing.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Don’t kid yourself, he’s no different from the rest. He can have anyone he wants, let me tell you. They want rich women. Not a schoolteacher with a child to support.”

I started putting the clothes back on their hangers. The skirt kept falling off.

“Just leave it,” my mother said. “They’ll do it. It’s their job.”

“I’m just going to cancel,” my mother said. “Oooh.” She swerved, just missing a garbage can. “I don’t have anything decent to wear. He’s not going to want me in these old fuddy-duddy clothes.”

“Why don’t you wear the blue?”

“That’s out of date. The collar’s no good.”

“Well, should I come home or not?” The appointment was for two o’clock, I’d have to miss an afternoon of school.

“Just come home and we’ll see. I’m not making any promises. We’ll just see.”

When I walked in, at noon, my mother’s six best dresses were lying out on the sofa. She stood in her lace underwear with her hair in rollers.

“Tell me, Honey, what would the other kids’ mothers wear, do you think?” She stood soaping her face with pink organic geranium soap. “What do you want me to wear?” I sat on the arm of the vinyl couch and she sat next to me, still soaping. “I even thought of calling Cassie Swan and asking her. Should we go, Honey, or not? Or should we just cancel?”

She felt frightened of people here. I’d gone to school and made some friends. But she still didn’t know anybody. The women we met all seemed to have about twenty times more money than we did. She tried, but it wasn’t like with Lolly. My mother thought they would be judging her, picking her over for faults. We’d come all the way here and now she was scared. And she’d had so much courage in Wisconsin.

“Wear the blue, it’s pretty,” I said. But I wasn’t sure either.

“You think? Even with that collar?” My mother looked up at me as if I could save her life.

“I think it’s pretty. He won’t be looking at your collar.”

She went back to the sink to rinse. Then she started on her eyes. Suddenly, she banged her hand down on the counter. “I’ve got it. I’ll wear the Gucci scarf. That’ll cover the neckline and then it’ll be smashing.” She started crying again. “Oh, that’s it, Ann, we’re going to make it here after all. I know it. I really do.”

We stood in the elevator. “Look once, Honey. Do I have any on my teeth?” We’d arrived forty-five minutes early to Dr. Spritzers
building and so we’d eaten hot fudge sundaes in the drugstore downstairs.

“Open a little wider, Honey,” Dr. Spritzer said. He looked even better than he had at the cake sale. His good face seemed to pop out of the tight-necked green smock.

“So how did you survive your cake?” he asked my mother over my head.

“Ours was very tasty, actually.”

“Let’s see here.” He moved something suspiciously like a pliers in my mouth. “Well, it looks like she’s going to need some braces for da teef, I’m afraid.”

“She is.” My mother patted my shoulder. “Well, Honey, it won’t be too bad. I guess you’re just going to have to have them.” She tried to look concerned and suck in her cheeks at the same time. “How long will she have to wear them, do you think?”

“We’ll just have to see how fast her teeth respond.” He shook my jaw. My mother didn’t say anything about the price and Dr. Spritzer called a girl named Pam to come over and make a plaster mold of my mouth.

“Hi,” my mother whispered. I was asleep, then I opened my eyes and made out the shape of her back. “Are you up? Unzip me, would you? I’m stuck.”

She wriggled closer to me on the bed. My fingers felt heavy with sleep and they wouldn’t move. Finally, the zipper sprang free in my hands. I opened it down to her underpants. My mother stood and hung up her dress in the closet.

“It feels so good to be out of that. But it was absolutely the right thing, the dress. It was perfect. Couldn’t have been better.”