Circles of Confusion (2 page)

"WACs, I think. She ended up in Germany after the war."

"How old was she? What did she die of?"

"About eighty. The lawyer guy said they think it was a heart attack. She lived alone, you know. Nobody's too certain exactly when she died." Claire suppressed a shiver. "Anyway, she's left everything to you."

"Me? Why me? I can barely remember her."

"Evidently she liked you the best of all us relatives. I don't think she was really close to anybody. The lawyer guy said that she'd been living like a hermit for years. Anyway, he wants you to go down there and go through her trailer. Sort it out. He says the park manager is anxious to rent out the space, so I promised him you'd come down this weekend."

"This weekend? You mean tomorrow?" Claire echoed incredulously, forgetting to keep her voice down.

Her mother's voice took on the wheedling tone that Claire knew all too well. "You know what they say about old people who live alone. Maybe she's held on to a fortune in pesos from the war."

"Marks, Mom." Claire effortlessly collected scraps of facts, and she pulled one out now. "I think the Germans use marks. But that's not the point—the point is, I'm sure Evan won't want me to go on such short notice. You know how he likes to plan things in advance."

"Oh, Claire, it's not like you're married to him or anything."

***

Claire waited until twelve, and the beginning of her lunch hour, to call Evan from the pay phone in the break room. No sense giving Frank any ammunition by making a personal phone call on company time. She sketched out the problem for Evan, fully expecting him to be annoyed by this change in plans.

"My mom tried to tell me it would be like a treasure hunt. I guess the lawyer says the place is piled high with all kinds of stuff." Claire turned to pace, but was brought up short by the absurdly short metal phone cord. She suddenly felt trapped, tied by a rigid umbilical cord to the hospital-green wall. "What's that squeaking noise?"

"I'm Lysoling the phone. Someone asked to borrow it after a meeting. There's a courtesy phone in the lobby, but no, he had to ask to use this one, right at the beginning of cold and flu season." The squeaking stopped, and then Evan began to outline a plan. In her mind's eye, Claire saw his long pale fingers methodically ticking off the steps. "If we leave Portland at six tomorrow morning and drive straight through, we should be there by eleven. We'll .spend the day cleaning things out, make a trip or two to Goodwill, pack up anything of value, and drive back to Portland with it tomorrow night. We can rent a U-Haul trailer if we need to."

She was surprised by his impulsiveness. "You want to go with me?"

"I'm not letting you drive that car of yours on a five-hundred- mile round trip. And who knows, it might even be worthwhile. If your aunt was anything like your mom, she'll have ephemera from the forties and fifties tucked away, still in its original boxes. Stuff like that could fetch a fortune now."

"Since she's related to my mother, it's more likely that we'll find some Jack LaLanne fitness plan still in its original 1957 packaging."

"That's exactly what I mean. Have you checked out those stores in Multnomah lately? They don't just sell Navaho rugs and Depression glass. People will buy anything if it reminds them of their own past—Howdy Doody mugs, old Life magazines, Nixon Now! buttons, handmade quilts, cast-iron frying pans. There are times when it pays to be related to someone who holds on to everything, and this may be one of them."

Claire sometimes thought in the shorthand of license plates, and she summed up Evan's hopes now: BG BKS.

After lunch, Claire tried to concentrate on work. A flock of birds flying by the floor-to-ceiling window caught her eye. They beat their wings so powerfully that she could see the muscles in their shoulders moving. Flying didn't look effortless, but it did look worthwhile. After the last bird disappeared, she watched the clouds sliding by. She could see herself reflected faintly, a ghostly figure with red- gold hair and appropriately pale skin. Around her, a beehive of identical cubicles hummed with the sound of ringing phones and the click-clack of computer keys.

She pulled a new application from her in-basket. The owner of a gold-colored Mercedes was requesting WHYWALK for her license plates. Claire ran down the checklist automatically: not an obscenity, not sex- or excretory-related, not slang for an intimate body part, didn't promote religion or drugs, didn't mean anything dirty in another language. She even halfheartedly took it into the bathroom to check out the words in a mirror, but the letters said nothing when reversed. Clearly, the owner was simply expressing an opinion, the opinion of a forty-three-year-old matron who lived in Portland's West Hills and thought her car was everything. And since the computer showed that no one else had the plate, Claire stamped the application Approved and put it in her out-box.

As she picked up another application, Claire remembered the last time she had seen Aunt Cady, at one of her grandmother's infamous birthday parties. Claire had been fifteen. It was the year before her grandmother died, and the last year she held one of her parties. Grandma Montrose—known as that even after her last name became Clabberwhite and then Woods and then Eastwood and then Reese—had been unwilling or unable to remember the exact dates of her twelve grandchildren's birthdays. She had solved the problem by hosting one giant birthday party for all of them every Fourth of July. Presents were always wildly inappropriate, reflecting whatever bargain Grandma Montrose had stumbled across in the weeks prior to the big event. One year it had been queen-sized pantyhose for the seven girl cousins when none of them was obese—or over the age of nine. Another year they were handed grab bags of items from the dollar store. Claire had gotten a canister of garlic powder, a flea collar and a pocket mirror.

That particular July 4th, her mother had driven Claire and her sister, Susie, south from Portland to Medford, where Grandma had moved after her latest divorce. The freeway was an endless straight line to nowhere, and five minutes into the drive Claire opened the copy of Gone With the Wind she'd checked out from the library the night before. She ate mechanically from a box of Pizza Spins, transported to another world, a world of eighteen-inch waists, hoop skirts and green-eyed jealousy. Even when they stopped for lunch at a McDonald's outside of Eugene, Claire walked into the restaurant blindly, her eyes on the book she held open before her. After lunch, she clambered back into the front seat of their beat-up Pinto. Susie's response was immediate.

"That's not fair! Who said you could ride shotgun all the way to Medford? Mom! It's not fair! Make Claire give me that seat!" Susie's voice held a whine that only a twelve-year-old was capable of. Her hair, carefully hot-rollered that morning in frank imitation of Farrah Fawcett, was already beginning to lose some of its bounce.

"Your sister's right, Claire. You should trade seats with her. Besides, you haven't even looked out the window once. I'd be surprised if you even knew where we were."

Claire didn't bother replying. Rhett had just asked Scarlett to dance, scandalizing the entire populace because Scarlett was a widow in mourning. Still reading, she picked up the book and got into the back seat. Susie used her new proximity to the radio to begin to hunt for a station that played rock and roll, and soon the interminable strains of "Stairway to Heaven" filled the car.

By the time they took the exit for Medford, the stunning heat of southern Oregon had sucked the energy from their bones. Portland and Medford lay at opposite ends of the state, and they had exchanged their lush, green and frequently wet city for a town cradled by tawny hills and capped by a hard, hot blue sky. As they drove down Jackson Street, the electronic temperature sign on the Far West Bank sign read 106 degrees. Once in Hawthorn Park, Claire kissed her grandmother's wrinkled cheek, trying not to inhale the scent of Virginia Slims. She nodded hello at the uncles, aunts and cousins clustered around Grandma's camper, with its not so secretly stashed keg. As soon as she could, Claire took shelter under an oak tree several hundred yards away. All around her, knots of people were barbecuing or playing Frisbee, but Claire was once again in the world of Rhett and Scarlett.

"Claire, dear, is that you?"

Reluctantly, Claire tore her gaze from the page. Her mom's Aunt Cady stood over her, a tentative smile on her face. Despite the heat, there was a faded cardigan over her bony shoulders. Her straight back and the prominent wings of her collarbone gave the impression that Aunt Cady had left the coat hanger in the sweater.

"Hi, Aunt Cady." All Claire knew about her was that she had been dead Grandpa Montrose's sister, that she had never married, and that she had had something to do with World War II, a million years ago.

"What are you reading?"

Claire turned the cover of the library book toward her.

"Gone With the Wind. I loved that book." She smoothed the back of her dress—the dress another thing that set her apart from the rest of Claire's relatives—and then settled down beside Claire. "I read it when it first came out. I was just about your age, and I had to hide it from my mother."

This was a brush with ancient history. When it first came out? Claire had looked at the copyright date, which was 1935. "Why did you have to hide it from your mom?"

"It might seem quaint to you, but even though I was nineteen she didn't think it was appropriate for an unmarried girl to be reading about a woman who is involved with man after man. She hadn't read it herself, of course."

"I love to read. I wish I could read all the time."

A garbled shout made them both look up. Cousin Bucky, clearly having paid a few too many visits to Grandma's hidden keg, had just fallen down in the parking lot. Uncle John, who insisted on cutting his son's hair so short that sleepy-eyed Bucky resembled a confused but amiable badger, looked on indulgently as Bucky attempted to stand. Boys would be boys.

Claire exchanged a glance with the older woman. Her great-aunt's eyes were a washed blue, deep-set in a pale, narrow face. Aunt Cady reached out to tap Claire's book. "Reading is wonderful. But you have to be careful it doesn't become a substitute for real life." Her voice dropped to a near-whisper, as if she were speaking more to herself. "I wish I had learned that lesson when I was your age."

People were always telling Claire that she read too much, but it seemed better than the alternative. Did her great-aunt mean that instead of reading a book about made-up people living a long time ago, Claire should be with people her own age? She looked again at her relatives in the parking lot. Her cousins were willing to hang out with the adults as long as the beer held out. Claire felt alien around other teenagers, with their conversations about smoking pot, drinking and streaking. Susie was more than happy to try to fit in. Claire saw that Bucky now had his arm looped around her shoulders. It looked as if he needed her for balance, but Susie's face had lit up as she experienced her first brush with romance.

"But if reading makes you forget your real life, isn't that good? Especially if you don't like it?" The people gathered around the camper seemed only technically her family. Grandma Montrose, who had spent the years before the war traveling around the country as a "Hormel Girl," now seemed to be demonstrating one of her old routines. In the middle of the parking lot, she gyrated her narrow butt and gestured broadly, singing about the wonders of Spam in a cigarette-roughened voice. Claire's mother was laughing so hard that she had crushed her paper cup, spilling beer down her T-shirt.

Aunt Cady had taken a while before she answered. "Maybe. But it's better to find a way to live in the world you want."

Now Claire supposed the reason she remembered the conversation so well was that it had been one of the first times an adult had spoken to her as an equal. But had she heeded Aunt Cady's warning? Did she still live only through books? Her life was boring, even to her. Two weeks before, she had been grocery shopping when she had suddenly been seized by the desire to live dangerously. Freeing a nested shopping cart, Claire saw that someone had left behind their grocery list. With a surge of exhilaration, she had exchanged it for her own. She bought some other person's Lite beer and Velveeta, spent the week trying to make meals out of lemon yogurt, Tater Tots, hot dogs and cream of mushroom soup, while her roommate Charlie watched bemused. By the end of the week, Claire had been forced to admit that it was easier to be herself.

Claire picked up another application—ANGI.BB—and tried not to feel depressed. She had worked for the State of Oregon for over ten years, yet she still held basically the same job. When she had first taken the position as a verifier, she had thought it suited her. She had understood and appreciated the little jokes hidden in people's vanity plate requests. Now Claire was bored by the whole thing, bored by her life, with its treadmill of work, exercise, and a standing Saturday date with Evan. Every ten minutes it seemed as if her car was thumping over the same pothole on the Marquam Bridge as she drove to work.

ZTHSIT?

"We're starting a new insurance line," Evan said. He kept his gaze steady on the road, his hands in the ten o'clock and two o'clock position on the Volvo's steering wheel. "Executive coverage."

"Executive coverage? What's that?" Claire asked. Evan must be happy with the time they were making, because he seldom allowed himself to be distracted by conversation while he drove.