Anywhere But Here (51 page)

My mother herself had blue eyes.

The next morning, my grandmother was waiting at the kitchen table. She had braided the hair she found in the brown bag of
candy and sewn the two thick braids into the back of a yellow straw hat. “With the hat on, they’ll all think you still have your long hair,” she said.

I hadn’t seen my mother yet.

That afternoon, my mother leaned against our white Volkswagen, her voice high above, far, her eyes on the telephone wires. “I think I may just go away somewhere, California maybe, maybe just away. You don’t need me here.”

I pulled her blouse, hard, trying to tug her down. Her face tilted up to the sky. “I do, Mom,” I said. Her blouse that day was pink gingham, her initials embroidered over the pocket in white, fancy letters. The sky was pale blue, with a few clouds, the telephone poles, brown and scarred. She looked down at me, took off the straw hat and tossed it on the grass. She ruffled my hair. “You do, huh? Well, okay.”

It only took the smallest thing. No one else in the world, nothing mattered.

11
LIME KILN ROAD

T
here’s a place in Beverly Hills where my mother and I lived for a little more than a year. From the outside the building looks like sandstone. The concrete seems gold, instead of gray, the slight difference in color of sand, when the sun comes out. On either side of the entrance, a molded lion’s head holds a brass ring in its mouth.

At night, small lamps hidden in ferns lit the lions’ heads. My mother and I always thought the building looked very elegant. For one thing, it was a move up for us, from our furnished studio. The apartments were like ski condominiums—there were six units, two floors each, on either side of a courtyard—and they seemed to be newly built. We felt proud to move in. My mother hired Daniel Swan’s twin sisters to help us pack and clean. We threw out our unattractive odds and ends and we lined the new kitchen drawers with checkered paper. We had high hopes. We wanted to live like other people.

The apartment retained a just-built feeling, even after we moved in. Maybe it was because we had no furniture. The long, newly painted white walls of the downstairs and the beige carpet throughout, its nap still even to one side, stayed bare. But it was more. The insides of closets smelled like fresh-cut wood. We moved a bed into each of the bedrooms. My mother’s room had built-in dressers; I just stacked my clothes in the closet. Ted’s huge radio sat alone on the living room floor downstairs.

We often leaned on the carpeted steps in the middle of the apartment and looked at the light coming in through the porch’s
glass doors, hitting our living room walls in spikes and patterns, sometimes splintering into colors. We both felt pleased with the apartment, with the fact that there was an upstairs and a downstairs. We kept the bare place very clean. We ate most of our meals out and when we stayed home, we balanced plates on our knees, sitting on the carpeted stairs. I did homework on my bed.

My room had a cubbyhole, where I stored things. A door opened out of the wall, and inside, there was a plywood shelf. Every night, I put my schoolbooks there. Slanted two-by-fours sloped from the ceiling down into the foundations of the house. The boards were rough and unsanded, light wood. Perhaps they kept the closets smelling new. Between beams was nothing. You could put your hand through. I tried to be careful when I laid things on the shelf, so they wouldn’t fall.

I don’t know why the space was left there. Probably it should have been tamped with insulation or more wood. Perhaps the chute was a carpenter’s mistake, someone else’s careless harm. I’ve thought about that odd construction many times because one day that winter, after months and a habit of nervous care, I knocked my elbow on a corner and my jewelry box fell down.

“Why on earth did you put it there? I told you to watch that edge, for God’s sakes. You knew it could go right through.”

But that came afterwards. First I was just stunned. I didn’t know why. I thought, Why would I leave something precious in the only unsafe place in the apartment? Perhaps there was a simple reason: it was a shelf. I had no dresser or desk for small things. But I could have put it on the floor.

It was the thing Benny gave me before I left, a tin box, with a hinged lid. Inside, I’d nested a ring, a handkerchief, a rolled-up list of my friends’ names. That chute led to nowhere, there was no basement in that apartment. Things that fell down the chute were irretrievable. I imagined the tin box lying on its hinges like an opened clam, still, on the dirt floor among bare foundation beams.

Several times I went to ask the manager. After we moved out, I walked by the building. I’ve written letters to the investment company that owns it. I don’t know what it would mean to me
now, the box and its contents recovered. Ben has been dead for years, the box was a collection of childhood things. Still, it must be there at the bottom of that building like the real ticking heart of a huge machine. You remember the places you’ve lost to.

The night Ben died, we still lived in the small furnished studio where my mother and I slept in the same bed. She shook me awake, her hands rough and gentle at the same time. She squatted near the floor, rocking on her heels, the phone to her ear. It was still night and she was screaming.

She told me he’d been in a car. Jay Brozek had been driving. Jay had been speeding and he ran into a tree. Jay was fine, just a scratch on his cheek.

A smile grew on my face, I didn’t have the strength to stop it. I felt the muscles rippling in my cheeks. Her face went crooked with pity. “Awww,” she kept saying, “awww, poor Annie, poor poor Carol.” When we hugged, we both squatted on the floor. I tasted her hair, a burnt taste, and her breasts moved against mine through our T-shirts.

We dressed and waited at the Western Union office with our suitcase. Carol wired us money for tickets. It was still dark out, when we drove to the airport. We didn’t tell anyone where we were going; my mother phoned in to both our schools and said we were sick. It was a Monday morning. We left our car in the airport parking lot. This was our first trip home since we moved.

In Chicago, we changed to a small, older plane with scratchy, red plaid upholstery on the seats. The stewardesses seemed different, too. I recognized their voices. For the first time I heard that we had accents where we’d come from. It was in the way they said their o’s. The stewardesses all wore the same maroon nail polish, matching their uniform belts. Their faces were not as delicate or chiseled as their counterparts’ on the coastal flight. Maybe airlines chose stewardesses for features and the larger, less balanced profiles were left here, caught in the narrow local triangle above the ground where they grew up. Those voices, their ready nasal friendliness, sounded homely. And then I thought of
how we spoke, my mother and me. I didn’t think we talked that way anymore. From then on, I started being careful of my o’s.

My mother turned in her seat. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Sort of a dumb accent, when you listen. Uneducated,” she whispered. She bent over me and peered out the window. “But look at all those little farms. It really is pretty land.”

The plane shuddered into its descent. Over the microphone, a stewardess asked us to buckle our seat belts.

Her voice hummed with pride and capability. Theresa Griling had wanted to be a stewardess, either that or a hairdresser someplace where rich people lived, Beverly Hills or Florida. When she’d talked like that, it had sounded brave and dangerous, something I’d never do. But, now these stewardesses seemed perfectly safe. Even in the air, even if they slept with a married pilot when the plane was grounded in Chicago for a snowstorm, even their adventures would be innocent. They would probably end up married and living somewhere within a couple hundred miles of the place they were born. They’d grow firm, righteous, the way good mothers become, their young optimism satisfied and thickened. Even those who’d chosen flight and travel, lightness, the air—you knew, listening to them, they’d never get too far away. Gravity sunk in the bottom of their voices, like the thumping of feet on the ground. Their flights would keep a tight perimeter between Chicago, the Twin Cities and Green Bay. We seemed different, already. I didn’t know what would happen to us.

The runways of the Bay City Airport were just clearings in the low woods, rimmed with aspen and pine. When the plane shuddered and rumbled and bumped, we closed our eyes, clinging. When I opened my hand, a few moments later, my mother’s nails had bitten in so hard there was blood. We both felt terrified of landing.

We walked into the airport slowly, dragging our one heavy suitcase. We saw Betty Dorris, the fat woman, still standing behind the ticket counter, wearing a blouse with a white ruffled collar. She had written my father’s plane ticket when he’d first flown away. Betty Dorris had always liked my mother’s men. The last
year we’d lived in Bay City, she had invited Ted over to dinner. Now, she wouldn’t look at us.

“God,” my mother said.

Years ago, in December, my mother and I drove to her house and bought Christmas tree ornaments, styrofoam balls she had covered with velvet and lace. We bought them out of pity and then gave them away.

“I think it’s rude that she doesn’t say anything. She sees us,” I said.

“Oh, of course she does. But you know, it’s her way of snubbing me. I suppose she figures Bay City’s hers now that I’m gone. Well, she can have it.”

We braced ourselves, waiting for someone to find us and take us to a car. We didn’t know who it would be. It was a relief not to see them yet. I knew the minute one of them looked at me, it would all begin.

My mother slipped the bag off her shoulder and set it on the floor.

“God, doesn’t it all look small?” She looked around and then back at me. “I mean, the airport, everything, just seems TINY.”

It’s funny how close you get, closer than in life, except for the seconds you touched, and then you were both moving, not seeing, exactly. Looking down at Benny, I thought there was something wrong with the way his nostrils joined his lip. They looked strange and fishlike, inaccurate. I leaned over to kiss him and tasted powder on my mouth and felt the hardness just underneath, like metal.

It was a brass-banded cedar box, lined in pleated pale blue satin. A piece of lace I recognized from my grandmother’s house lay under his head. It had always been draped over the davenport.

Carol stood on the carpet in her nylons, her high heels next to her feet, facing forward.

“They used to water the greens,” Jimmy was saying. “See, then they let them golf free. So he was there with Susie and a whole group of them. And Jay Brozek was there too, he had his own car. So Ben got in the one car with Susie and all the rest.”

“He was
in
the car?”

“He was
in
the other car and then Jay called him and said, Hey, Ben, come on over and ride with me, I’m all alone. So he did.”

My mother crossed her arms over her chest and then she wiped her glasses on her silk scarf. She was wearing a black pantsuit, belted. “In the millions,” she said, frowning. Pews lined the center of the room, so people gathered at the edges, where floral arrangements stood on the carpet. Smaller bouquets were set on draped tables. “Absolutely, they’ll be rich from this.”

“He can sue for companionship, for loss of income.” Hal bent back his fingers, counting. “He’ll be able to retire.”

Carol moved from her shoes, which were still planted on the carpet, facing the coffin. “I wanted you to see.” She pushed the back of my neck, dunking me over a bouquet of long-stemmed dark roses. They looked tinged, almost black. “From that little Susie.” My aunt looked at me. “See, I always said, if Ben grew up and wanted to marry that Susie, we would have been glad, Ann. And they’re not rich either, the parents both work. But it’s a clean nice family.”

The couple who owned Krim’s bakery tapped Carol’s shoulder. Grilings shuffled behind them.

“When you were little, you always thought you were adopted,” Theresa told me, “because your mother had blond hair and you had dark.” She reached out to touch my hair, the way she always had, as if black hair were amazing.

I asked Theresa and Mary how they liked the academy. “Fine,” they each said quickly. “Good.” They had known Benny, too, more than I did the past few years.

They told me Rosie had gotten married and moved to Milwaukee and Stevie had gone into the navy. He was on an aircraft carrier going around the world. Theresa said she planned to enlist in the air force when she graduated. On her coat, she was wearing small tin silver wings, from American Airlines. I recognized them, they had been mine. A stewardess gave them to me once when my mother and I flew home from Las Vegas.

“You’re going to join the army and leave Mary all alone?”

“There’s my dad,” Mary said quickly.

“Air force,” Theresa corrected.

Then Jay walked in the back door, flanked on either side by Chummy Brozek and his second wife, Darla, who was so fat she had to make her own clothes. She wore a huge brown smock with regular terry-cloth house slippers.