Anywhere But Here (53 page)

After the funeral, my mother drove downtown to get her divorce. She took a long time dressing for it. Her lawyer told her there would be problems in the way of bills from Ted’s credit card. Ted had ended up paying for our Lincoln. My mother skipped the cemetery. The rest of us went and then followed in a slow caravan back to Lime Kiln Road. Women put on aprons in the kitchen and stood cutting cakes on Carol’s counters. Jimmy stayed outside, tending the barbecue pit. Hal lugged things—silver kegs of beer, trays of chicken for the grill. There was one round table under an umbrella where the priest sat with his feet up. He wore white athletic socks under his sandals.

There was a small stand of pines between my grandmother’s house and Carol’s, in the common backyard. I walked over and stood there, my heels puncturing the dry brown leaves and pine needles. My grandmother once told me that during storms her husband had fastened on snowshoes and trekked out to stand in this grove of trees, watching the snow come down. Protected by the high branches, he stood and watched. She said he loved the silence. The pine smelled sharp and good. This was the place Benny and I buried our pets; a bird with a broken wing we’d fed from an eyedropper, a lame squirrel. We’d sat in here for hours. We’d felt invisible then, inside a dome of different air. Now it was a few scraggly pines. We’d marked the graves with crosses made from clean licked Popsicle sticks and now they weren’t there anymore.

I picked up a handful of dirt and let it fall down off my fingers. Things didn’t stay and for no good reason. My father’s hole in the hedge was a shabby lapse now, almost grown over, as if the bushes were slightly diseased. I thought about our crosses; wood wouldn’t dissolve into the ground, not in five or ten years. No one would take them, but they were gone. Things just disappeared and we weren’t even surprised. We didn’t expect them to last.

When I walked back to the patio, someone was passing around a large gray rock. “It’s a rock from Pikes Peak,” Hal said. It was labeled in my grandmother’s even penmanship,
Rock From Pikes
Peak
. “I took a trip to Colorado and Ben said he wanted a rock from Pikes Peak.”

“Oh,” the women said, in low voices, as if they were holding a dangerous and beautiful secret.

The rock passed from hand to hand on the back patio, the story repeated in different voices. “He said he wanted a rock from Pikes Peak,” Jimmy said.

Right then, I wanted it to take home with me to keep. I wanted it a lot and I couldn’t think of anything else for a while.

The women stood in the kitchen again, rinsing the dishes and stacking them. Everything outside seemed very clear, the dark green hedge, the corn, the red barn and the highway overpass. The sky was a tender blue with slow pink clouds. Ordinary objects looked precious and defined the way they do sometimes in cold air. It was still early in the afternoon and it seemed as if nothing would change, as if the fields and light had settled into a permanent weather.

The screen banged and my mother tripped, her heel catching in the netted doormat. She let the air out of her cheeks slowly. She stood on one shoe, the other stockinged foot at her knee, her arms crossed over her chest. I was sitting on the warm white stones of the barbecue pit. I waited for her to find me.

Then she saw me and shrugged. “Well, we’re free,” she said. “We didn’t get much, but it’s over. We’re single.”

The trouble with serenity is that it can turn. The trees seem to lose their souls and look again like painted scenery. You hug your knees and kiss them as if chilled. You pinch yourself. Then you turn to other people, talk, you trust only human beings again, as if nature has abandoned you. Christianity must have been born in twilight.

Only the family and Lolly and the priest still sat outside, on the back patio, when the air began to lose its light. The priest lit a cigarette.

I was thinking of Ben again, I imagined him drinking margaritas, banana daiquiris, the way he danced, stamping his feet, spinning, lightly touching Susie’s breasts by the side of the house,
driving, speeding in the night. “You can smoke?” I said to the priest.

“Sure.”

“He’s a super-duper-modern priest,” Carol said. “They give guitar masses now. Oh, it’s all changed since you left. They go to Michigan on retreats. I’ve seen this one in blue jeans.”

The priest laughed, his soft voice dissolving quickly in the air.

“Can you drink?”

He nodded.

“So can you screw now, too?”

“Ann,” my mother said. She and Lolly warmed their hands over the barbecue pit. “I don’t know where she learns that language. Two days here. She doesn’t talk like that in Beverly Hills.”

“Some things haven’t changed,” the priest said.

Jimmy leaned over the table. “Annie here asked you, Father, because she was interested.”

“Oh, Jimmy,” Carol said.

It was too early for crickets, but it seemed we could hear the night coming slowly, before the light dimmed, a shifting of the earth. The trees moved as if they were pulling into themselves.

“Oh, and he’s a good preacher, too, Ann. You should hear him. They come all the way over from the West Side.”

“We go at night now,” Jimmy said. “Guitar mass.”

“You didn’t know your aunt and uncle were such swingers.”

“Me, I don’t go to church,” Hal said. “I pray by myself. God knows what I’m saying. I just ask him straight. None of this bullshit.”

Nobody paid any attention to Hal, but that was normal. We were all used to ignoring him.

“Different for you,” Hal said, pointing to his daughter, Tina. “You have to pray out loud. And you know why? Because I said so.”

“I do,” she said.

The five o’clock train came, a long faltering wail in the distance.

“Are you too cold?” Jimmy asked me.

“No, it’s okay.”

“’Cause I can go get you a sweater. You’d fit in one of his.” It broke my heart, Jimmy like that, kind.

“So do you like California?” the priest asked my mother. His forehead had no lines, he seemed so innocent, local.

She shrugged. “Well, yes and no. I do and I don’t.” Her arms spread out, glamorous, over the pit. “I mean, I work nine hours a day and drive two more and just so we can live in one room where she goes to a decent school. So there’s no time, really, or money, for me to have any fun. But, yes, I’m glad to be doing it. I’m glad to be giving her this opportunity.”

No one said anything. The ice cubes knocked together in Jimmy’s glass. Even Lolly seemed embarrassed, looking down. Our leg waxes, the days of facials, hours in tight pink masks, then the steam room at Elizabeth Arden’s. I got to go, too, Saturdays and her date days with Josh Spritzer. The opera dress with windows of sheer fabric, revealing printed scenes of other cloth. Palm Springs, the ocean, the desert. We had fun. But I didn’t say anything, either.

Jimmy stood up, he was always the worst with my mother. Carol seemed to have a genetic patience for her.

“Let me tell you something, Adele. We all work too, we—”

“Jimmy, don’t,” Carol said.

“I’m going to go get another drink.” He went in through the sliding glass doors he’d built himself, years ago, when Benny and I were pests, underfoot.

My mother appeared injured. “Well, sure you work, too, but you have the house, you have the trailer—” My mother moved her face, looking around at it all.

I stared at her. “You wouldn’t want it,” I said.

Lolly reached out and touched my mother’s arm.

“Just today, let’s not have any fighting once,” Carol said.

My mother and Lolly started whispering between themselves. “Well she …” my mother was saying, as I moved away.

The night before, we slept in my grandmother’s house. We needed to be alone. We’d snooped around, opened drawers just to see the things once again where they’d always been, picked at food in the refrigerator. My mother sat on the kitchen floor with her legs spread out, searching the bottom cupboards for hidden cookies.

“They’re in here somewhere.” She’d been happy. I could have let her look, but she had this grin that bothered me.

I told her. “She stopped making them years ago.”

“No,” she said. “Those round flat butter cookies. She hides them in here somewhere.”

“With the ground hickory nuts and powder sugar on top.” I shook my head. “It hurt her eyes too much to pick the nuts.”

“Oh.”

An hour later, my mother came and touched my shoulder and said, “How did you know she stopped making those?”

I shrugged. “I just knew.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that,” she said.

Then she called Josh Spritzer. The way she talked there was no possible way he could imagine our kitchen. She sat in the corner, her bare feet up on the vinyl chair. The electric clock above the stove buzzed, the cuckoo thugged, the refrigerator churned and the fluorescent curved tube of lights over the table hummed. The inside of houses in the country were like that then. Because of the silence, like a long throat, outside.

I could tell from the way her voice rose in waves of enthusiasm—too much music, nerve and light—that Josh Spritzer didn’t want to be listening. Her breath gathered as she began each sentence. “And my sister, on the day of the funeral, was counting the flower arrangements.” She laughed, trying to make it light.

After, she went humming through the house, filing her nails. But the phone call hadn’t gone well; when she hung up, she’d stayed where she was and stared ahead at the wall for a full minute.

“Maybe we should go back early, huh?” She stopped in the living room doorway and looked around. “Our life isn’t here anymore, you know? It’s there.”

Tina was fidgeting and when Hal yelled at her, she started to cry. He picked her up, then, and spanked her and her yelps escalated to screaming. Our heads bent down over the table.

“Hal, just leave her be once.” That was Carol. “Ogh, Hal, she’s overtired.”

He pointed, with the hand not holding Tina, to his chest. “She’s
my
kid, mine. She’s not yours. I’ll do what I want with her.” Tina stopped crying. She hung still now, limp off his shoulder.

Jimmy was standing at the sliding glass doors. He let them pass.

“I mean, if I’d had half the help
she
did from my father.” My mother had been talking to Lolly but her voice rose loud in the pause. “The house and every year a new car.”

Jimmy just stood with his drink, inside the open glass doors. “Adele, come here a second.”

She looked up. She was sitting on the edge of the stone barbecue pit, a leg swinging over the side. “What for?”

“I want to show you something.”

“Show me what?”

“I want to show you the deed and the mortgage for this house I’ve been paying on for twenty-one years and that I’m still paying.”

My mother shook her head. For a moment, I blushed. I thought she was ashamed. But she looked up again. No one could beat my mother. “You know who helped me when I got married? Nobody.”

“Come in here.”

My mother started crying. “I’m not going in there with you, Jimmy. You’ll hurt me. I know that’s what you want.”

The priest sat chewing on the end of a weed and the evening train went by, a low crooked moan from the tracks. The young priest looked wistful then, as if he wished he were going somewhere.