Anywhere But Here (63 page)

I remembered I wouldn’t let the guy who took my money for the ad open the envelope until I left. He was cute, redheaded, he looked like a college kid and he flirted with me, but
after he read my ad, which must have been as soon as I walked out of the office, I didn’t want to see him again.

I never went and checked my post office box for replies.

Another time, I rummaged through the jumbled suitcase from home. It was a little library of me. First-grade report cards, average, average, average, one above-average—in penmanship—a list of friends to work on stuck in a book (some who already liked me, some who might), a large photo album with one entry, pressed yellow roses and a faded orange clear hospital identification band. Wisps of hair curled in envelopes. Baby teeth in eyedropper bottles. Beach ball photographs.

I remembered it only dimly, the place on the highway, Kelly’s, a small brick store with a house in back. Mostly, they developed film, you parked your car on the gravel and went in to pick up your packet of snapshots. It was a dim rainy day when we went, a carpeted room in back. The man looked young and dull. My mother was the brightest thing there, full of light and authority. I wore an orange raincoat with pink dots over my tiny swimsuit and thongs. I remember them posing me with the beach ball, remember lying on the carpet, arching up, for them to slide the swimsuit off. I don’t know, I must have been six or seven. I hated the way my hair looks in the pictures, up in a bun, and my forced big smile, the way my leg tilts, posing. It’s funny for me to think of us in that little dim place by the highway, taking nude pictures of a seven-year-old with a colored beach ball. At one point, my mother took a powder puff out from her purse and powdered me.

She still has that little orange and pink raincoat. She keeps it in dry-cleaning cellophane at one end of her closet.

Leslie and I shopped together for college. Used clothing stores on La Cienega for broken-in Levi’s, we tried on hundreds from the wooden apple barrels, chose the ones that fit and then tore the knees. We bought tiny used T-shirts with numbers on them which we wore so tight they bound our chests and a strip of skin escaped uncovered above our belts. Her parents kept asking me over to
dinner, but her family got on my nerves. It was the same every night. Her father, her mother, her little brother, where they sat, the bowls of food moving around the table like a clock.

They all kept quiet, only Leslie complained. “So why
don’t
we do these things, why
don’t
we boycott grapes?”

But Leslie’s parents never yelled. They remained soft-spoken always. “You have to choose your causes,” Leslie’s mother murmured, “we can’t do everything for everyone. Or we’d be boycotting the whole store. We’d have nothing to eat. Your father and I have chosen the Jews. When you go away to college, you’ll find the one or two things that mean the most to you.”

Leslie rolled her eyes at me. Later, in her room, she shook her head, “I’m counting the days. Sometimes I think all my mother cares about is getting her nails done and her legs waxed. She’s like a mannikin in a store window.” That’s what I thought of Leslie’s mother too, I would have agreed if I didn’t know that kids really love their parents.

When we walked downstairs later, a huge fight started between Leslie and her father over Häagen-Dazs. Häagen-Dazs ice cream was just new in the stores. Leslie’s parents said they wouldn’t spend two dollars on a pint of ice cream, no matter what. Leslie screamed, Dana’s father bought it for his kids.

I just wanted to go home. My mom and I sometimes bought two pints and each ate one, right from the carton, with a spoon.

One day I brought the rent check up to the big house. I went through the kitchen and while I stood talking with the cook, Mr. Keller walked in. I realized I’d never seen him in the kitchen. He looked slight there, out of place among the huge stainless steel sinks and counters.

“May I have a word with you, Ann?”

We walked through the living room to the back terrace. We stood looking over the lawn and the tennis court. His face twisted. “Do you have all the money you need, for college?” he said.

I shook my head, yes.

“If you need anything,” he said.

I looked back towards the empty house. “Where’s Mrs. Keller?” I asked.

“In San Francisco for the day.”

Daniel Swan wasn’t going anywhere. The San Ysidro house stayed the same: the Failure’s deal still hadn’t come through in Mexico, the Witch still whipped around the corners like a wind, late and busy. The only one making money was Riley, who had already started a rock band. The summer before we’d been in a commercial together. The Swans weren’t moving, but they didn’t have the money to send Daniel away to college. He was going to stay at UCLA. He didn’t seem to mind. We sat on the steps in back of the house, our heads on our knees, staring at the plain dry canyons. “My grandfather’s jewelry business, he sells diamonds, I might do that and make a ton of money. Or I could work in a bank like my cousin. I might do that or developing. I’d like to buy my own boat, then you don’t have to worry about anything, a sixty-foot yacht and you could live on it and go around the world.”

“What about astronomy? I thought you were going to major in astronomy.”

“I’ll do that too. I could go to school at night, if I make all that money I won’t need a degree, I’d just want the classes, I don’t know, I might do anything.”

Before I left for college, it seemed my mother was working all the time. One night we parked in front of a house on an empty wide street north of Sunset. The palm trees seemed to whisper over the lawn. “Too bad Idie’s dead,” my mother said as we made our way up the driveway. A Mrs. Dover invited us into the kitchen. We followed her as she slip-slopped through the cluttered house. “The shanty Irish,” my mother mouthed.

I sat next to my mother at the kitchen counter, listening while Mrs. Dover made tea and talked about Melly’s heart. Melly’s heart this, Melly’s heart that. Mrs. Dover moved slowly, like a fat person. Mrs. Dover said she could cook only some things now and not others, now they could walk but never too fast, they took rides
but not far and all because of Melly’s heart. We listened nicely, my mother smiling as if she understood the moment before Mrs. Dover said it.

“It’s all the same heart,” Mrs. Dover whispered over the kitchen counter, as if she was afraid of being overheard. “Idie was a year younger when she, you know. He’s sixty-five now.”

“But you forget, Trish, that he’s in good shape.” My mother’s voice scolded with conviction. I didn’t know whether she was telling the truth or not. “Idie was fat, Trish. And she didn’t exercise. And do you know what she ate?”

“So you think he’ll hang on a while?” Mrs. Dover laughed a short laugh.

“She ate doughnuts. Jelly doughnuts. That’s all she’d eat. The dietitian forbade the aides to give them to her but she wouldn’t touch anything else. Sure. Jelly doughnuts with powder sugar on top.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, of course. He’ll live another ten years, Trish. At least.
At least
. Now, you’re the one who needs more exercise. You know, when Melly’s seventy-five, he’s going to be in good shape and he’s going to want a wife in good shape, too.”

“You think so?” Mrs. Dover looked up at my mother.

My mother and I ran down the gravel driveway to the car, giggling. She drove fast through the residential streets to the store windows on the way to Baskin-Robbins. “Boy, would you look at that suede suit. Isn’t
that
elegant. That’s what I need, a few good suits that’ll take me anywhere.”

“I’m sure it’s incredibly expensive.” Clothes had been so easy when we worked in a store, like a game, getting more and more, making outfits. Now, they seemed hard and important again.

“Yes, but it’s quality. That’s what I’ve always done. I’ve always bought the best, good fabrics and with a good cut that’s really well made. And then it lasts forever.”

“Fine if you can afford it in the first place.” I worried about my mother managing her money, after I was gone.

She sighed. “You can’t even let me have a little fun, imagining, can you?”

As if it were something unconnected to my leaving, incidental, my mother would mention her plans to kill herself.

“I might just drive over …”

“You’ll get the insurance.”

“You’ll be
fine.”

“I want you to invest that, it’ll be a lot of money.”

“You’re a survivor.”

I did not believe her and I did. I knew my leaving would make a difference, could make a difference.

Anyway I left.

The Saturday after my last shoot for “Sante Fe,” I made an appointment to get my hair cut. I told my mother in the morning.

“What are you going to have, a trim?”

“More like a cut.”

“Oh, Honey, no. Don’t, Ann. You’d be crazy to get more than a little trim. Why do think you got Marie Iroquois, that’s what’s cute about you, Honey. And don’t think that doesn’t matter at college, too, believe me. Really, it’s the truth, Ann.”

“I’m just telling you. For your
information
. I’m not asking for advice. I’m just saying, I’ll be gone between eleven and noon. You better find something to do with yourself, that’s all.”

What she found to do with herself was drive to the beauty shop, sit and read magazines in the front, by the window. I’d never had my hair cut since those boys chopped it off on Halloween when I was eight. Just trims. I’d always had long hair. It had seemed important.

I watched the woman and her scissors in the mirror, the little wet pieces falling everywhere. A circle of hair stuck around my shoulders on the cotton smock and a wider circle fell on the floor. The little pieces felt sharp, they itched my neck.

My mother ran up. “What are you doing? She only wanted a little bit. Oh, Honey, look. You just wanted a trim.”

They each stood over me, one of them holding scissors.

“That’s not what I said.”

“You sure did, that’s what you told me at home this morning.
You said just a little. She’s got six inches off already, it’s going to look awful. What are you letting her do to you?”

“Please sit down, Mom.” I looked at my hands lying there, on the beauty shop smock. They could have been anyone’s hands.

My mother turned to the woman cutting my hair. The woman, pivoting on one foot, leaning close, cut in quick, decisive clips. “Why don’t you at least undercut it, so it turns
under
, not up? That’s just going to flip up when it dries. It’s going to be awful.”

“I am undercutting it,” the woman said.

“Jeez, Honey, I could have taken you to the man who does me in Glendale. You should see the beautiful cuts. The girls your age come out with this full, long, bouncy hair. And it just curls. He cuts it so it goes under.” She picked up a panel of my wet hair and dropped it back onto the cotton smock. “She’s thinning it,” she said. “You’re thinning it.”

“I am not thinning it,” the woman said.

“May I ask you where you learned to cut hair?”

“Mom.”

“I’m just asking her a question. She can tell me.”

“I studied in New York and in London.”

I smiled for pretentious Westwood, where PhDs worked at the post office and my hairdresser studied in London.

“Where in New York?”

“I studied with Christiane at Michel Heron and with André.”

“Oh. I haven’t heard of them,” my mother said. “Oh, stop, please. You’re not going to take any more off, are you?”

“I’m going to shape it, so from the bangs down to the shoulder, it’s one line.” The woman gestured with her comb. “Okay?”

“Oh, God. I don’t know why you do this to me. Well, fine, it’s your life. But you just have to rebel, don’t you? You have to make yourself ugly. Don’t you see, Honey, you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

“My hair. I’m cutting my hair.”

“Are you jealous of me? Is that it? Because, Honey, you shouldn’t be. I’m your mother. I can help you. If you’d only let me. You should see the cute cuts they’re giving.”

She walked out of the border of the mirror. Then she came
back. “I can’t stand it. I can’t sit here and watch her doing that to you.”

“You’re not sitting,” I said.

The woman kept turning on one foot and snipping. The hair was now an inch above my shoulders. I turned and saw my mother in the front of the store. She sat back down in her chair and opened a magazine.

Next to me, a man blow-dried a young girl’s hair, pulling the brush tightly away from her face. The two hairdressers smiled. “Is she always this way?” The woman looked at me in the mirror.

“Just about my hair. She always wanted me to have long hair.”

The woman turned her blow-dryer on. In a minute, my hair began to look beautiful, a neat thick clean line next to my chin.

My mother appeared in the mirror again, holding her magazine in one dropped hand, moving around the chair, circling me. I wouldn’t look at her. She stared at my face in the mirror.

“You’ll just let anyone be your mother, won’t you? You let anyone but me.”

I never did hear from my father. I used to think, he might see me on TV and write me or call me or something, but nothing ever happened. I don’t know, maybe he tried or maybe he didn’t have a TV or whatever. I suppose it could have been anything.