Anywhere But Here (31 page)

“We’re going to Disneyland!” my mother said, covering the mouthpiece with her hand. Into the phone, she said she’d take me out of school. We’d fly to Las Vegas and then the three of us would drive west to Disneyland. I didn’t recognize the voice when
my mother held out the phone. It sounded like someone I didn’t know.

I held on to the edges of the kitchen table. I wanted to go to school the next day. I shrugged and wouldn’t touch the phone.

“You’ll know him when you see him,” she said.

We waited three days for our summer linen dresses to be dry-cleaned. “It’s going to be hot,” my mother warned. “Scorching,” she added, with a smile. It was snowing dry powder when we left; we saw only white outside the airplane window. Halfway there, we changed in the tiny bathroom, from our winter clothes to sleeveless dresses and patent leather thongs. My mother brushed blush on our pale winter shoulders. With her eye pencil, I drew freckles on my nose. It still felt cool in the plane, but my mother promised it would be hot on the ground.

It was. The air swirled with visible heat and dirt. A woman walked across the lobby with a scarf tied around her chest for a shirt.

My mother spotted my father in the crowd and, holding my hand, pulled me towards him. We pretended I recognized him, too. He looked like an ordinary man. He wore tight black slacks, a brown jacket and black leather slip-on shoes. His chin stuck out from his face, giving him an eager look.

He had our brown Valiant parked outside and my mother sat in the front seat. We passed motel swimming pools and the tinge of sky hung over the water like a line of dirt on the rim of a sleeve. My father parked in front of a low pink stucco apartment building. When we walked up, three men crowded on a porch, leaning against the iron banister.

“He told us you had long hair,” one said.

“You look like your dad.”

“A real brunette.”

“She’s prettier than her dad.”

My father smiled and the gaps between his teeth made him look unintentionally sad, like a jack-o-lantern. He touched my hair, looking down at it, and I knew he was proud of me. I loved him blindly then, the feeling darkening over everything, but it passed.

“Don’t you want to introduce your friends to me, too?” My mother pushed our suitcase onto the porch. She smiled the smile she practiced in front of the mirror, sucking her cheeks in to make her bones seem higher.

The men wore V-necked T-shirts and their skin was dark like my father’s. The way they bent and leaned and shuffled while they stood made them seem dangerous, like teenagers. My father introduced each man and each man smiled. He said they were his roommates. Then he gave me a present: a package of six different colored cotton headbands. They made me think of Easter eggs. I held the package carefully and didn’t tear the cellophane open.

My father worked as a waiter in a hotel restaurant. My mother and I went there for supper, our first night. We ate slowly, watching him balance plates on the inside of his arm. He sat down with us at the end of our meal, while my mother sipped her coffee. He crossed one leg over the other, smoking luxuriously, when my mother leaned closer and whispered in my ear.

“When are we going to Disneyland?” I said, saying what she said to say but somehow knowing it was wrong.

My father put out his cigarette and looked up at my mother. “You’re late,” he said. “It’s Friday. You’re four days late.”

My mother pushed her hair back with her hand. “Well, we were busy. There were people we had to see. We canceled plenty as it was.” My mother could hold her own. “So, when are we going?” she asked gamely.

“When you didn’t come Monday, I lost the money I’d saved.” He said this matter-of-factly, looking around the room.

“In four days, how?”

“On the tables.”

My mother’s voice gathered, “You, you can’t do this to her.”

Back at my father’s apartment, they sent me outside to the porch. There was a book of matches on the ground and I lit them, one by one, scratching them against the concrete and then dropping them in the dirt when the flames came too close to my fingers. Finally it was quiet. My father opened the screen door and I went in.

They’d put sheets on the living room couch for me. They both
undressed in my father’s room. My mother looked over her shoulder, while she unzipped her shift. Then she came out to say good night. She looked down at me hard, as if she were trying to judge whether I was young enough to forget things I didn’t understand. She sighed, finally deciding it wouldn’t matter.

“Now, don’t say anything to Gramma that I slept in his room. But there’s nowhere else to go here.” She rubbed my back absentmindedly for a second.

The next morning my father and I woke up early. We walked to the hotel coffee shop and sat on stools at the counter. I was afraid to ask for anything, so I said I wasn’t hungry. My father ordered a soft-boiled egg for himself. We didn’t talk. I watched his eyes catch on the uniformed waitress, the coffeepot tilting from her hand, a white purse on the other end of the counter. He seemed happy.

He whistled the refrain to his song, a song we all believed would be a hit. I sang along the words to myself. “Oh, Ringo Starr on top of my tree, Oh, Santa bring the Beatles to-oo me.” Ringo was my mother’s favorite Beatle. “He’s so homely he’s cute,” she always said, clicking her fingers against her thighs when she and Lolly danced in the den.

The egg came in a white coffee cup. He chopped it with the edge of a spoon, asking if I’d ever tasted a four-minute egg. I ate a spoonful and I loved it. No other egg was ever that good. I told my father, hoping we could share it. But he slid the whole cup down, the spoon in it, without looking at me and signaled the waitress for another egg.

Walking back to the apartment, he kicked sand into the air. He turned to me suddenly, as if he’d just then thought of something.

“How do you like school?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said. “I like it.”

“That’s good,” he said. Our conversations were always like that, like lighting single matches.

I sat on a towel by the hotel pool while my parents tried to win back our money for Disneyland. When my mother rubbed lotion into my shoulders, she pointed to a woman sleeping on her back,
with a washcloth covering her eyes. A child squatted next to her head, brushing the woman’s hair with a toy brush. A boy, asleep next to them, had a white bar of soap hanging from a braided cord around his neck; his fingers moved over the soap, as if he were dreaming on it.

“Those kids are in the shows at night. Look at that,” my mother said. “The kids make the money and the mother just lounges.”

Later, when my parents went into the casino, the little girl pulled the woman’s hair.

“Shhhh,” the woman said. “And let him sleep. He was up late. Go in the water, Honey.”

But the boy woke up and ran onto the diving board, the muscles in his stomach jiggling like a bowl of shaken water. The sound of his yell made the woman sit up and lift the washcloth off her face.

His feet flapped on the surface of the water, then he stopped and shook. His mother and sister and I all stared but he didn’t seem to notice us. He seemed to be splashing with other, invisible bodies in the pool.

I watched the boy most of the afternoon, hoping he would look at me. He stood gurgling water, his head tilting up, soaping himself with bubbles from the bar around his neck. His mother would pull to a sitting position every once in a while, taking her sunglasses down from the top of her head, and smile, watching him, look nervously over to his sister; then, having counted each of her children, she would sigh, sinking back to her towel, opening a magazine over her face.

I waded in the shallow end. My mother said I could play with these children so I knew I could, but I didn’t know how to start. It seemed too hard. I closed my eyes, tumbling through the water, and thought that when I went home I could write letters to them. Months later, back at my grandmother’s house, times when I wasn’t even thinking of my father, I felt like writing a letter to that boy. But I didn’t even know his name.

“So we’ll go to Disneyland next trip,” my father said, walking me back from the pool. There were no lawns in front of the parked
trailers, but the sand was raked and bordered with rows of rocks. My father’s black slip-on shoes were scuffed. He was holding my hand but not looking at me.

“When?”

Suddenly, I wanted the name of a month, not to see Disneyland but to see him. Taking long steps, trying to match his pace, I wanted to say that I didn’t care about Disneyland. I dared myself to talk after one more, two more, three more steps, all the way to the apartment. But I never said it. All I did was hold his hand tighter and tighter.

“I don’t know,” he said, letting my arm drop when we came to the porch.

On the plane home, I held the package of headbands in my lap, tracing each one through the cellophane. My mother turned and looked out the window.

“I work,” she said finally, “and I pay for your school and your books and your skates and your lessons.”

She picked up the package of headbands and then dropped it back on my lap. “A seventy-nine-cent package of headbands,” she said.

I hid behind a tree, watching my grandmother walk down the driveway, the back corner of her scarf whipping in the wind. The red metal flag stood up on the mailbox. I watched her shuffle through the mail and shove it into her pocket. She didn’t hold any of the letters in her hand or look at one for longer; that meant there was nothing unusual. Then I ran up to her.

I thought I still wanted to go to California, but later. My blood ticked from running, the damp air touched my temples, the wind was a battle in my sleeves. Twigs lifted off the ground as we headed towards the backyard, where the wash was still moving on the lines. I helped my grandmother gather the sheets, collecting clothespins in our mouths and pockets, to carry them in before the rain. The sheets that night felt stiff on our beds, smelling of soil and cold water. When it started to rain, we hauled out our buckets to collect in the yard, under the eaves troughs. My grandmother
believed rainwater made our houseplants grow. At night, we listened to the sounds on the roof. It was a different life from my father’s, from what we imagined was California. I didn’t know whether I watched for the mail because I wanted a letter from my father, or because I was afraid and hoped he would stay away, so we could keep what we had.

At Bob’s Big Boy, one day in the summer, my mother and I pressed together in the phone booth and emptied her purse out on the metal ledge. There were hundreds of scraps of paper, pencils, leaking pens, scuffed makeup tubes, brushes woven with a fabric of lint and hair, a bra, and finally, my mother’s brown leather address book, with the pages falling out. We wanted to call my father in Las Vegas. It was already over a year since we’d flown there. The number was written, carefully, in brown ink.

My mother dialed, saying Hold your thumbs, here’s hoping. She said a quick, mumbled Hail Mary, rounding off the four points of the cross to a touch on her forehead and three quick taps on her chest. I scraped all the coins from the bottom of her purse. When the operator came on to say how much the call cost, my mother lifted me up and I dropped in the money. We both waited, our mouths together by the receiver. A sleeping male voice answered.

“Yeah?”

My mother asked if my father was there.

“No,” the man said. “Wrong number. Nobody here by that name.”

“Well, do you know where he went? He used to live there, we saw him there.”

“Not since I’ve been here.”

“Would one of your roommates know?”

“I’ve been here the longest.”

“Oh,” my mother said. “All right.”

We called information in Las Vegas then and gave my father’s name, but they had nothing listed.

Sunday was the day my mother took over the house. My grandmother woke up early and drove to church. Everyone on our road went to church except us. In the morning, when our neighbors were driving into town, the women holding the clasps of their purses in their laps, Lolly drove on the same highway, in the other direction, with the car radio on, and a box of warm cinnamon rolls open on the passenger seat.

She went to Krim’s, Bay City’s best bakery, early, before the after-church crowd and bought twelve of the large soft rolls for just us. They were expensive and we loved the extravagance. By the time Lolly stamped to our back door, my mother was up and around the kitchen singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” and the pitcher of dark, thick orange juice was slowly filling. It was my job to squeeze the oranges.

Lolly tore open a new carton of cream and walked out to the porch. “So did you try it?” she asked my mother.

With my grandmother gone, they didn’t even send me inside when they talked. We ate slowly, on our second rolls each. My mother and Lolly sipped their coffee. They gave me a mugful just to warm my hands. I took small drinks and it tasted like dirt. I was trying to learn to like it.

“Why do you ask?” my mother said.

“I just thought, it seemed last night on the ice, there were some, shall-we-say, new jumps?”