Best Friends (5 page)

 

 

 

EXAMS CAME, the school year ended, Sally and I packed up our rooms and went home. “Anytime,” Sally said. “Just call me. And for as long as you want. The only week that wouldn't work is when we're going to Lake Tahoe.” Unlike me, she was looking forward to relaxing with her family.

Was there a part-time job I could get? Kmart? Dairy Queen? Two hundred dollars. Twenty-five extra dollars a week and I could do it.

“I'd hate to see you take a second job,” my father said. “You work so hard at school.” I had my old familiar sensation looking at him, a flood of gratitude and love. He was always good to me. He told me how he'd gone on a trip to Nashville when he was in college and had a wonderful time. “Don't you worry,” he said. “I can save a few dollars a week. Our little secret.”

I still had some friends from high school in Happyville, and lots of nights we went out, usually in a group. We sat down by the reservoir and smoked, or visited a bar outside town that was lax about IDs. I drank Scotch, but never much. I didn't have sex with anyone, or even neck. I got home before midnight. My old friends thought I'd become an in-tel-lec-tu-al snob, but I didn't care. I was filling in time, waiting for my real summer, my real life, which would start the second I reached L.A.

To save money, my dad packed his lunches, stretched the time between dry cleanings, walked to work. He liked to buy a candy bar every day to eat on his way home, but for my sake he gave that up. He also gave up doughnuts and elephant ears from the bakery. He kept me posted. By the middle of July he had one hundred and sixty-five dollars, and had incidentally lost eleven pounds. He figured I could go to California the first week of August, when the doctors' office was always slow. In Nashville my father had met a fellow who took him home for a dinner of squirrel stew.

“Squirrel stew!' ” I said. “Yuk!”

“Oh no, the sauce was delicious. And believe me, in a bowl of squirrel stew you don't encounter too much meat.”

Then, out of the blue, there was a crisis. It changed everything, in a way.

My father always dressed for work very formally in deference to the doctors. When I was a kid, he'd worn a hat. He even ironed his own shirts, and he hardly ever wore one with short sleeves. He had three suits, one blue, one black, one green. I knew the green one was a problem—it had a sheen to the fabric, it just wasn't attractive—but he'd picked it out himself.

One of the doctors' wives, Mrs. Danforth, stopped by the office two days in a row. She told her husband that the first day his office manager (my father, that is) looked like a funeral director, and the second day he looked like a used-car salesman, and she didn't know which was worse. Dr. Danforth told my father, my father came home and told my mother and me, and the upshot of all this quoting was that my father had no choice but to buy, with the money earmarked for my trip to California, two new suits. I accompanied him shopping. And the suits he bought were beautiful, truly. “I owe you one,” he said.

I GOT OFF the plane and it was bright, it was glaring, I could hardly see. There were lots of people I assumed were foreigners, Indians in saris and Orientals in too-short trousers, but the people who didn't look like foreigners dressed in short shorts and tight T-shirts or open shirts the likes of which I'd never seen. Every other woman my age was overgroomed, tanned, overweeningly self-conscious, an aspiring starlet. I slouched and shrugged and ambled through the airport. I was wearing a pair of straight-leg jeans and my pussy-willow blouse, and I looked fine. I was twenty years old, a month from my junior year of college. Sally met me by the baggage area and hugged me, her grip tugging at the ends of my curtain of hair. “It's not smoggy!' she said excitedly. “I woke up this morning and I said, ‘Daddy, it's not smoggy!' That's a sign.” She called for a porter, then led me to a big black Mercedes with a Mexican driver in it. “Julio,” Sally said,
“Aquí es mi amiga Clare.”
She looked at me and grinned, hoping for a reaction.
“Mucho gusto,”
I said, cool as a cucumber, glad I remembered a phrase or two of my high school Spanish. I was still puffed up with pride from flying.
“Mucho gusto a Usted,”
Julio said. Julio was large and middle-aged and wore an embroidered Cuban cotton shirt. I wondered if he'd ever flown. He put my suitcase in the trunk. It looked like a thimble in a sewing kit.

“It's splendid that your dad popped up with the tickets,” Sally said. “Where in the world did he get the money?”

I was so taken with her “splendid” that I lost my train of thought. How did he get the money? I had no idea. “Magic!” I laughed, snapping my fingers.

We climbed into the wide backseat. “This is actually something,” I said, and a spasm of pleasure crossed Sally's face.

“It's really Daddy's car,” she confided. “He doesn't like me to come to the airport by myself.” She rolled her eyes. “Fear of terrorists. But it is kind of fun, isn't it?”

Here I am being driven through Los Angeles in a black Mercedes with a Mexican chauffeur, I thought.
Ay caramba.
I put on my new sunglasses and grinned at Sally.

 

 

 

“GUESS WHO I saw today? Ali MacGraw.”

“Really, Daddy? Where?”

We'd just finished touring the house. The front entrance hall, backed by a bank of windows, was two stories high, and we were on the balcony above it when Mr. Rose appeared, hand on the polished railing, at the bottom of the stairs. The sun was setting and threw a glare off the window, the stone floor, the stair railing, the gleaming wood table, off everything but Mr. Rose. I couldn't see him clearly. A squat dark figure in a brilliant room. At that moment I remembered a picture book from my childhood and the words “Rumplestiltskin, that odd little man.”

“In that flower shop off Sunset. You know.”

“Did she look nice?”

“Very pretty. Fresh. Like you.” For the first time he noticed me. “Maybe like you too,” he said, jabbing the air in front of him with his finger.

“I'm Clare.”

“Figured.”

There was an awkward pause. “I'm happy to be here.”

“You like the house?” he asked. “Sally show you your room?” He spoke as he had on the phone, loudly and definitely.

“She's sleeping in my room, Daddy.”

“You sure?” Mr. Rose asked me. “You don't want to try the guest room?”

Sally answered for me. “No, Daddy. We want to talk.”

Mr. Rose threw out his hands. “We got this great guest room and no one ever uses it.”

“Patricia could use it.” Pa-tree-cee-a, she said it in the Spanish way. Sally was grinning at her father: this must be a private joke.

He took a few steps up the stairs, and I could see him more clearly. Thinning hair, black streaked with gray, sideburns that stretched under his cheekbones, dense hair on his arms, pale and watery eyes. He wore khaki trousers, an open-necked shirt, a large watch. “Patricia has a color TV now, okay? Patricia is totally happy where she is. Patricia lives”—he rolled his eyes, flashed a rakish smile—“in the temple of the now.”

When he smiled, he was transformed. I could understand why Sally described him as handsome.

“I like that.” I smiled. “ ‘Temple of the now.' ”

“Sure you do,” Mr. Rose said. “What's not to like?” He abruptly turned away from us and strode off down the steps, but called over his shoulder, “Hey Clare!” He was walking so quickly I couldn't have answered him if I'd tried. “You still keeping your wacky Shabbos?”

 

 

 

“WHAT DID CALIFORNIA look like?” my father asked.

“Like you'd expect. Palm trees, dry-grass hillsides, fancy cars. It looks like the movies. The only thing that surprised me was how close together the houses are in Beverly Hills. Huge houses with these tiny side yards. Where Sally lives, though, it's nice. She lives on this spur off Mulholland—that's a road that runs on top of a spine of hills. The guy at the hot dog place said people go up to Mulholland to neck. Sally didn't even know that.”

“And Sally's house, it was like you expected? It was a big place?”

“Oh, Dad, you wouldn't have believed it. It makes Dr. Danforth's place look like a tract home. We pulled up in this big black car, like a diplomat's car, with Julio the driver and Sally and me in back, and there's this big black gate with curlicues. It just swings open! Julio opens it by remote control. Like James Bond or something. This wide wide driveway. The house looks like some big gray ship that's crashed into the rock. Sally says it's organic architecture, it won some award. It's supposed to look like it's growing out of the rock. On the other side of the house is the pool and patio, and beyond them the hill drops away, and right there at your feet is Los Angeles.”

“Los Angeles at your feet. I'm not surprised.”

 

 

 

MY FATHER HAD COME up with the money—magic!—and presented me with the plane tickets. “How—?” I'd asked. “You didn't borrow—?”

“Shhh. It's all set,” he'd said. “Don't worry, it worked out. The doctors know and it's fine if you take that week off.” The trip was for eight nights, from Saturday to Sunday. I would be leaving in a week. “And here's something for clothes,” my father said, handing me fifty dollars. “You'll want to look nice.”

“Dad! I can't believe this.”

“You deserve it,” he said. “Go out there and eat some squirrel stew.”

“I have no idea,” my mother said when I asked her. “And he won't tell me. Your father can keep his mouth shut.”

 

 

 

WE DID THE TOURIST THINGS, sure, but mostly we stayed at the Roses' house, which had been designed by an architect based in New York City. There were roofs at funny angles, balconies whose sole purpose seemed to be holding boxes of flowers. There was the espalier near the pool, in all its useless and deformed beauty. Who would plan a tree like that? Who would have the patience to guide and prune it year after year? “It's like Carlos's damn kid,” Mr. Rose said. “It was nothing to start, a baby tree two feet high.” A flagstone patio ran across the entire back of the house. The patio held three or four tables with umbrellas, surrounded by chairs, and still the stone expanse looked vacant.

The rooms inside were as big as hotel lobbies, with seamed tile floors, cold on bare feet, scattered with rugs in wavy patterns. Windows as big as aquarium walls faced the patio. Huge abstract paintings hung on the walls. “That's a Pollock,” Sally said of one. I'd just learned the word “gouache” and I thought Sally was talking about a painting technique. “Cool,” I said.

The closets did impress me. They were equipped with cubicles and wooden cabinets nice enough to show off in a living room. When you opened any closet door, a light automatically came on. Sally's bathroom, just off her bedroom, was bigger than my bedroom at home, with plants and a skylight and a see-through glass shower stall you had to step down to enter.

“Quite a house,” I told Sally. How could you eat a Sunday-night supper of leftovers here? How could you yell for your brother to answer the phone? He couldn't even hear you.

 

 

 

MRS. ROSE LIVED in the kitchen. It was only years later that I thought of her as a troll in a cave. The kitchen was expansive, uncluttered, gleamingly clean. Small pots of cooking herbs lined up on the ledge of the window. Mrs. Rose was neat too, and drab. Her hair was a stiff brown helmet. She looked older than her husband and dressed like an older version of Sally, a simple knit top tucked into a pair of belted pants. I wondered what designers she was wearing. “Clare?” Mrs. Rose said, her inflection slightly questioning. Sally had told me so little about her mother that her inoffensiveness took me by surprise.

I noticed the noise of a TV, realized it came from a room across a hall from the rear of the kitchen. I glanced around a door: a dark woman in a light green uniform was sitting on a single bed, smiling at something on TV. Color TV. Patricia. The maids' quarters.

Actually, there were two maids, and they spent a lot of time in the kitchen. The first day I washed my hands in Sally's bathroom, and when I returned a half hour later, the towel was gone. “Did you see my towel?” I asked Sally.

“Oh,” Sally answered, “Patricia must have taken it.” She showed me where to get a fresh towel, out of one of the illuminated closets. The first morning my bed was made before I came back upstairs after breakfast. But on the days Patricia and Conchita moved around the kitchen—chopping, sauteeing, stirring, measuring—my bed wasn't made till after noon. Mrs. Rose stood in the center with her wooden spoon, turning the pages of cookbooks, pondering. She had a little handheld dictaphone into which she dictated grocery lists. Sally said Conchita often shopped more than once a day. The food we ate!