Anywhere But Here (28 page)

“Damn,” my mother said.

“Could you please shut up.”

“Jeez. You think you’ve got something a little decent once that you’ve paid a lot for, and then, before you know, it’s just another piece of junk, too.”

I did feel bad about the car. I knew how she thought. We were one by one getting the things you needed for a life. We didn’t expect to get ahead or get extra things, not since we’d moved. We just wanted what it seemed everybody else already had. But things didn’t keep. We’d never have them all at once. It made me think of the junk in Griling’s front yard, back on Lime Kiln Road. All those parts of things. I could understand it when my mother
sighed. When she did that, some part of me opened and closed again.

I did weird things, too, by myself. At night, when we went to dinner, I said I had to go to the bathroom and walked upstairs to the wall of phones and phone books. The Hamburger Hamlet had thirteen different phone books for LA. I looked in two or three a night—that’s as long as I thought I could be gone before my mother would miss me—for the first three letters of my father’s name. I’d gone through every phone book and it was never there, but still, any time I was anywhere near a phone book, I had to check again, as if it could be. I was never surprised when I didn’t find it. I didn’t think about it too much. It was just something I did.

The last day of school before winter vacation, Daniel Swan started walking home with me. I guess like my mother said, it was easier for me to meet people. He was a guy in my class. He always kept a stash of square Kraft caramels in his jacket pocket, sometimes he’d give me one, sometimes not. I didn’t want him to see where I lived, so every few blocks, I’d stop and say, This is out of your way.

He’d start ahead of me, digging his hands in his parka pockets. “I’ll go a little bit farther.”

Finally, we stood in front of my apartment building. “Okay, I’m going to go now.” I put out my arm like to shake hands.

But he didn’t leave. I didn’t invite him in, even though I had my key in my hand, and he didn’t ask. Our apartment was on the first floor, you could see our front window. But I didn’t tell him which door was ours, or anything, and we just sat on the landing doing nothing. He gave me a caramel and started opening another for himself, the cellophane one small glitter in the dull late afternoon sun.

Then I heard the scrape that was my mother’s car going down into the garage. It made an awful sound. I just sat there.

“Hi, you kids!” my mother shouted as she hurried up the ramp, pitched forward because of her high heels. She dabbed the edge
of her eye with a sleeve. She was carrying a stack of files, as usual. It was December, but in Los Angeles, December can be like autumn. The air was dull and cool and smelled as if the earth were about to change.

“Hey, why don’t you help me carry in groceries!”

We both ran down the concrete to the garage, glad to be told what to do. Then, I was grateful for the car. The leather smelled rich and good. I was glad my mother kept it clean.

My mom had gone shopping, so she could offer us things to drink. She’d been to the Linville Nutrition Center and bought pomegranate juice and carrot juice and celery juice and three kinds of kefir. Daniel seemed used to that kind of thing. When she asked him, he said he wanted peach kefir.

My mother brought out bags of cranberries and brand new needles and threads. She told us she’d seen gorgeous strings of cranberries on a Christmas tree in a store window, prettier than popcorn, and so she thought we should make some. They were opening lots already, all over Westwood, the trees bundled together and stacked against walls.

We sat on the floor and started stringing. It was hard. The needles seemed thin and flimsy against the berries. We pricked our fingers and broke the cranberries and after a half hour, we each had only a short little stringful to show for it.

“Well, we’re going to have dinner at the Hamburger Hamlet, Daniel. You’re welcome to join us, if you’d like. Or if you can, if your mom’s not expecting you.”

“But you mean, we’re going to give up on the cranberries?”

“I think we should, don’t you?”

Daniel stood and wiped his hands on his pants and followed my mother to the sleeping alcove where she pointed to the phone. In the little space between the bed and the wall, there wasn’t room for two, so she moved out of the way for him.

“The Witch will still be working, but I’ll call the rest of them. They’ll be glad I’m not there. More food for them.”

“Oh, Daniel.” My mother laughed as if that were a joke.

In the living room with just me, she sighed and her shoulders dropped and she looked tired again.

We crowded in our regular booth at Hamburger Hamlet, all three of us.

“Hmmm. They’ve raised their prices, I see,” Daniel said.

Neither of us ever would have said that. It seemed odd and happy for someone to talk about money.

My mother put her menu down and smiled. She was charmed. It was a relief to know other people thought about money, too. “You may have whatever you’d like, Daniel.”

“Hmm, I always like their halibut, but it’s gone up since the last time I was here.”

“Oh, go ahead. Get it,” my mother said.

On our week’s vacation, my mother and I wandered into a store on Brighton Way and bought two suede jackets to give each other as presents. They were expensive, but they were on sale and my mother said they would be good forever and you need one or two smashing things.

So we had those and there weren’t going to be any surprises. We’d received wrapped boxes of presents in the mail from home in the middle of December and we opened them as soon as they arrived.

We didn’t know what to do with ourselves during vacation. We saw Julie once and we took an old woman from the Lasky House to the Hamburger Hamlet for dinner. Beverly Hills put up elaborate decorations on the streetlamps, but except for them you wouldn’t have known it was Christmas. When we drove out of the commercial district, the long residential streets looked bright as always. The lawns were thick and tended, green, the palms tall and dry, and we heard the hollow thonks of volleys on hidden tennis courts.

My mother said we could get steaks for five dollars at the Chart-house, a new redwood restaurant on the water, so Christmas Eve we drove down to the beach. We argued, I thought the place would cost more. But by that time our car was looping on Sunset over Westwood. From the hills, the pink roofs of UCLA looked quaint.

But I was right. When we stood inside the Charthouse, waiting, my mother raised her eyebrows and said, “Let’s go.”

I wanted to stay. You could see the waves through a glass wall. It was warm and softly lit, the Beach Boys sang from the corners, a woman had already taken our names.

“I
told
you,” I said.

We walked out on the gravel parking lot to our car. “Honey, they’ve gone up. You used to be able to get a steak here for five, six dollars,” my mother said. “Well, anyway, it was a nice ride.”

We drove back to the Hamburger Hamlet. Later that night, my mother rewrapped the presents we’d gotten from home in better paper, paper that all matched, and she wrapped our jackets and whatever empty boxes we could find around the house. “Just to make it a little Christmasy.” She’d bought thick shiny dark green paper and red satin ribbons.

Then, at ten o’clock, my mother decided she didn’t want to do any more decorating until the house was clean. “Let’s just stay up and finish it. Then we can wake up in the morning and it’ll be all done.”

“Can’t we do it in the morning? Why don’t we just put the felt up and the cookies out and go to bed.”

“Well, I don’t care what you do but I’m staying up. I couldn’t sleep with that kitchen floor the way it is.”

“You’ve slept fine every other night.”

“Honey, I’m not going to fight with you just because I want something a little nice once in my life, at Christmas. I’d like to wake up Christmas morning and have the place clean, okay?”

I didn’t argue anymore. My mother started on the kitchen and put me in the bathroom. She told me to scrub every tile and then the insides of the tub and the toilet. I was down on my knees with a pail of water and ammonia and a plastic cylinder of Comet. I swiped pieces of dirt and strands of hair from the corners. I stopped for a second and looked down into the toilet water, blue from Comet. Then I went into the kitchen to get something to drink.

My mother knelt, fiercely scrubbing the floor.

“Don’t tell me you think you’re done already.” Some hair fell
out of the rubber band and a vein in her forehead was raised. She looked strained and awful, like a dog pulling against its leash.

“I just wanted to get something to drink.”

“Oh, okay.”

“You bet, okay,” I said, carrying my glass back to the bathroom.

“Shhh, the whole building can hear you, these walls are like nothing.”

“I don care,” I shouted. And then I turned the shower on before she could say anything else.

The bathroom did look nice, the tiles glistened, clean, but there was something about our apartment that still didn’t seem worth the work. It felt like a toy apartment, nothing was big enough, and whether it was a little cleaner or a little dirtier, it still wasn’t right. That was the thing about working hard on it—while you looked close at one little thing, scrubbing, you forgot. Then when you finished and stepped back, it was always a disappointment you couldn’t change more.

At two thirty we quit. We peeled our clothes off right onto the laundry pile. We still didn’t have a hamper. It was another thing, like ice cube trays, that other people always had. The clothes smelled the way a refrigerator smells when you defrost it.

My mother sighed when she handed me the alarm. “I set it for six,” she said, in the dark. “We’ll feel better when it’s clean.”

We slept a groggy sleep until eleven. When we woke, the apartment was warm.

“Are you up?” my mother said. She sat, hugging her knees under the blanket. From where we were, we could see the opposite white wall, where the paint was cracking, and the bathroom door. “Well, Merry Christmas, Little One. Should we open our presents now or should we best leave them wrapped a while? They look so nice wrapped.”

“We can leave them. We know what they are.”

“You know, I know I said we’d go out to breakfast but we slept so late I’d almost rather just stay here and finish so it’s done. Then
we can go to your friends’ this afternoon.” We had been invited to one Christmas party by a friend of mine from school, who lived near us in an apartment. Her mother and stepfather were giving an open house. It was the only Christmas thing we were doing.

“I’m hungry.”

“Have a little eggnog, Hon, and let’s get started.”

“What do we still have to do?”

“Not too much, really. We’ve got to vacuum, and especially the closets, because they’re full of dust. Then the windows and polish the silver and that’s it. Then just decorate.” She shrugged. “I just can’t really relax until it’s done.”

For maybe the first time in my life, I went without being asked to the closet and took out the vacuum cleaner. I began in the bathroom, banging on walls.

My mother walked past, still wearing only her sweat shirt, drinking from a carton of eggnog.

I pulled the plug on the vacuum cleaner.

“Could you PLEASE not drink from the carton. Could you just pour it in a glass?”

“I can see you’re in a pleasant mood for Christmas.”

“There’s germs.”

“The other one’s unopened. Drink from that.”

I plugged in the cord again and pounded against the floorboards. A few minutes later, my mother tapped my shoulder. I jumped. “Honey, we should really call home. Let’s do that now.” She sat on the bed and crossed her legs. “You know, I don’t know why they can’t call us. It’s later there, you know.”

I opened the new carton of eggnog, poured some into a glass. I took the carton to the living room closet, where I kept my school-books.

“So did you get the sweater?” my mother was saying, into the phone.

“Let me talk,” I said softly.

“You didn’t! You’ve got to be kidding. Well, they sent it two weeks ago! You
didn’t
get a sweater? Are you sure? It was a, a brown sweater. Are you sure, a brown sweater, with, let’s see, a shawl collar and yellow buttons! Oh, it was beautiful, Mom.”

The way she was yelling, my grandmother must have been holding out the phone.

“It’s not her fault,” I said, but my mother didn’t hear me. I was sitting on the floor, gulping. I didn’t know if there really was a sweater. I’d never seen it or heard about it. She could have gone and done it without me. But then, why wouldn’t it have gotten there? Other people’s things always worked.

“It was from Saks. They said it would get there for sure. Oh, I’m sick, I’m absolutely sick. It was a beautiful sweater, gorgeous wool. Oh, and it had pockets. Well, you’ll see. It should come any day now.”

The sweater never arrived. Neither did Carol’s nightgown or Jimmy’s scarf or Benny’s sweat shirt or Hal’s blazer. And my mother did it again and again, every holiday. It got to be a joke with the rest of us, “Did you get the sweater?” And it got so my mother didn’t trust the United States Postal Service. If you said you were going to send her a letter, she wanted you to insure it.

We went back to cleaning. Every few minutes, she would stop and shout. “She could do a lot more to help you, you know? You’d think she’d want to help, her own daughter. But no, not her.”

By the time the apartment was ready, it was after three. I ran to the kitchen to throw away the dirty paper towels from the windows. The open house at my friend’s was from one o’clock until six. We had to hurry.

Then my mother handed me the car keys to get the cedar boughs from the backseat.

“Can we do that later, we’re going to miss the party.”

“Honey, it’s going to take three minutes. This is the very last part. Just let me feel like it’s finished, so I can at least think we’re going to come back to a clean house. Here. Go on, Ann.”

I squeezed the keys in my hand so it hurt and ran outside. The street was deserted and the air was cool so my arms had goose bumps. It felt good. The light was soft and gray, as if it might rain. In another window in the building there was a huge fake tree
with colored lights that blinked. An older woman lived there alone and she hardly ever came out.