Leave It to Me (6 page)

Mama chose innocence. “Didn’t it work out with that nice Oriental man?”

“I don’t know any nice men. Apart from Pappy, of course.”

“Pappy’s going fishing this weekend. With Uncle Benny. He needs the break. They both need a break. Benny got hit bad in that malpractice suit. Pappy’s advising bankruptcy. You’d’ve thought chiropractors were safe.”

“Mama, I need to know what you know.”

“Hold on a minute. I need to sit, and the cord doesn’t stretch far enough. Let me pull up a stool.”

“I know what to get you for Christmas,” I joked. “A cordless.” I heard Mama’s heavy tread on the kitchen’s old wooden floor, and Patsy Cline on tape. Then the dragging sound of the stool.

When she came back on the phone, she asked, “How much will you have to shell out, Debby?”

In blood or cash, Mama?

“They might be dead, hon. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for it to come out that way.”

“Don’t be sorry, Mama.” For all I knew, Finders/Keepers was a scam, the kind that’s exposed on
Dateline
or
60 Minutes
. “We have a name at least.”

Mama sobbed. “Why, Debby? What didn’t we do?”

“It’s not about us.” I loved this woman, but love wasn’t enough in the face of need; it would never be. Need teased out the part of me that the orphanage had whited-out in my best interest. “It’s about me and them.”

“We don’t have a name, hon, we have a confused kid turned hippie. What kind of a real last name is Iris-Daughter?”

“I’ll find out soon enough.”

“There’s not much to find, Deb. The nuns weren’t great at paperwork.”

“I don’t have a choice, Mama.”

“Some of the documents were sealed. I’m pretty sure that’s what our lawyer and the orphanage’s lawyers said. Because of the lawsuit.”

“What lawsuit?”

“Oh, nothing to do with us, dear. Indians were pressing those charges. The Indian government.”

“What charges?”

“I’m not sure what exactly. But serious charges.”

“That’s a break for me, Mama. If they had a police record, that’s something to go on.”

“Being a criminal is a break? What kind of talk is that?”

“Just kidding, Mama. You brought me up to be decent.”

“Do you want to come to dinner Friday night? Sleep over? Pappy’ll be gone. I have a nice pork roast in the freezer.”

“Can’t. Sorry. Something I have to do this Friday.” I made my mind up what that something was the moment I finished lying to Mama.

“Well, there wouldn’t have been much more to tell you in person, I guess. Our lawyer said the one thing we had in our favor was that the woman was an American citizen. That made you a citizen too. The woman told the nuns she’d sign the adoption papers if they got us to pay her airfare back to the States.”

“So you saw her?”

“No, she had us buy a Delhi-San Francisco ticket. We didn’t want to see her. We wanted to give you a clean start, that’s why we changed the name the nuns gave …”

“Faustine?”

“It sounded so foreign. Fossteen. Why’re you doing this now, Debby? You didn’t show the least curiosity before, you never asked questions …”

“It’s not because I miss them, Mama. It’s about medical history.” And psychic legacies.

I hadn’t yet met Madame Kezarina, the pay-per-prediction prophet with unusual props. I hadn’t yet stuck voodoo pins into her Hate-Me Hand nor rubbed the big toe of her bronze Vishnu Foot for good luck. I hadn’t sat under Madame K’s Mariposa Mystic, a wooden doll bought on sale at a Taxco boutique, and meditated on genetic mysteries. The mariposa is a butterfly-woman with horns and wings in dramatic reds, blues and greens, with big-nippled breasts and larva legs and feet. She hangs on the wall of Madame K’s “office,” a bug evolving into deity, a deity dissolving into bug. I see myself in the mariposa doll. Just as I had in the freakish dog in the pound.

Finders/Keepers took my fee and told me to get in touch with its San Francisco office, which would be in a better position than the Albany office to help. My file had been electronically transferred. I wouldn’t have to pay new start-up charges, though the hourly rates might be a little higher out west. The California bug in my head, I followed my file; I fulfilled my fate.

But before I got in my car to track down Clear Water Iris-Daughter, whatever her current name, on the other side of the continent, I made sure the bad times I’d pledged did indeed roll Francis Albert Fong’s way. One late-August night, I stood with gawkers across from the turreted and gargoyled Fong house on Union Avenue and
watched rivers of flame lick at vintage velvet drapes, then split off and multiply, and crawl like amoebas across massive oak doors and curved-glass windows. A spectacular extravaganza of light, sound, heat. I was an auteur, too. Frankie had no right to be angry. He had a duty to take pride in my accomplishment.

Clarity. That’s what I prize more than knowledge. In the hot, harsh light of clarity I saw for myself the difference between justice and vengeance.

Frankie would file an inflated insurance claim. That was okay with me; the Flash’s losses deserved some extra compensation from corporate thugs. The costs I extracted—loss of past and loss of pride—were unreimbursable, and permanent. Frankie wouldn’t pursue any case of arson. He couldn’t afford to invite too much investigation, not with the undocumented Chinese aliens in his basement, the ones who did the cooking and cleaning for First Class Fong. The Fong Home Products frontman would hire new waifs and run them through mock interviews in other motels. And maybe get lucky next time.

Inner peace. That’s what I gained that smoky summer night as a wide, gracious porch smoldered and Frankie wept.
Nirvana is finding the tiger balls within you
. I ambled to the used Corolla Pappy and Mama bought me for graduation, and I made my sputtery getaway while the firefighters were still hacking away at Frankie’s dream house with their axes.

Part Two

Eastern, Central, Mountain, I ate the zones a day at a time, Chicago to Cheyenne to Salt Lake and Reno. For twenty years I’d set my watch back and forward twice a year, now I was turning it back every day. It seemed like a gift from God, that extra hour, then two, then three—no wonder Californians were different; they had more daylight to do things, longer nights to sleep through. That went a long way to explain the difference between Serena DiMartino and Clear Water Iris-Daughter.

Like Columbus, I was on the Pacific glidepath looking for the westward passage. Out west, prime time must start in the afternoon. Letterman was already back home in Connecticut when he was just starting in California. Weirdness.

Before that week I’d never been west of Niagara Falls; now I was driving through places that were only rumors. States no DiMartino had ever been in or talked about kept taking me by surprise: Ohio? Indiana?
So that’s where they put it!
I’d never thought there could be so much emptiness, and so many places just like Schenectady with their own evening news, with their own traffic jams and freeways. I didn’t get it. Why would people choose to live there?

My first antelope. My first Indian. First real mountains, with August snow. Radio signals from every state west of the Rockies, south of Alaska and north of the Canal filled my ears with strange music and revival and call-in complaints. At night, all Spanish. I didn’t see a tree for two days, and then came the downscale sublime
Utah!
The state had an exclamation point on its license plates like it was its own musical. Seven brides for one horny brother? Salt flats, miles in every direction, which I walked on, fell down on and stuck my tongue on,
Hey, where’s the ketchup? You shoulda seen that French fry!
I bet myself the next state had to be California because my money was thin by then, but it turned out to be Nevada, even drier and emptier, where gas stations and 7-Elevens had slot machines and “ranch” meant “whorehouse,” which I discovered when I drove into one looking for cowboys. Probably lots of those cowgirls working the ranches had more than arson in their pasts. I made forty dollars on the slots crossing the state.

California sure knew how to make an entrance, knew how to keep you waiting. Forget and forgive the stuff they taught in school about the Donner Pass.

After all the dust and emptiness, I was primed.

You are a twenty-three-year-old SWF
, I tested myself.
You are attractive, and you are street-smart in a Schenectady/Albany sort of way. You have a sense of humor, which gets you dates and jobs. You also have your pride, which, when it gets out of hand, burns down an ex-boyfriend’s house. Given such assets of your looks and character and the liability of your situation, do you:

A. hide out on a Nevada ranch and save your neck until Flash calls off his goon squad?

B. become a Mormon and save your soul?

C
.
enlist in the Peace Corps and save the world?

D. confront your deadbeat mom?

Luv ya, California! Greetings from Debby Clearwater-Daughter!

I owed it to my family to share my happiness. On an impulse I got off the highway, and from the pay phone of the gas station closest to the exit ramp, I dialed Mama. The phone rang and rang. Pappy didn’t believe in answering machines. So I dialed Angie next. Some jazz group I didn’t recognize came on first, then a man with a whispery voice and an accent I couldn’t place. “You have reached the pad of Egberto and the
bella
Angela. When two people are in love, answering your call is not a top priority. Leave a message or get a life. Whatever you decide, you have thirty seconds. Oh, and Beth, Ingrid and Manju have moved on to Alberta and couldn’t care less about messages.”

I slapped the pay phone a couple of times with the heel of my palm.

The teenaged attendant shook his head. “I know just how you feel,” he said. “Sometimes that phone don’t work so good.”

I caught the spaced-out smile on his bronzed, benign face. A good mood is a good mood, even when chemically induced. I envied him. I said, as a joke, “Think I should sue the phone company?”

“Why not?” the kid said. He picked a stick of beef jerky out of a jar by the cash register, and peeled its wrap partway. “What do you have to lose? Time’s running out on corporate deep pockets.”

“My sister,” I volunteered, “wants me to get a life.”

The kid took a meditative chew. “Cool,” he said.

“My first time in California, would you believe?”

He pulled another vile-looking stick out of the beef jerky container. “Hey, on the house,” he said. “Have a nice life. Have a nice day the rest of the day.”

I sucked and chewed on the jerky as I got back on the highway. If the world has a finite supply of bad days and nice days, I owed it to myself to grab as many nice ones as I could. Go for bliss. Dump pain, pity and rage on somebody else. Pursue happiness: that’s the American way. Dial the Bay Area branch of Finders/Keepers the next chance you get. Muddy Clear Water’s conscience. Or, better still, make Bio-Mama pay for her shallow-pocketed maternalness.

And when getting a life is your goal, why put off till tomorrow what you can do this nanosecond?

Pursuing bliss, I took the very next exit ramp off the highway, and called San Francisco information for Finders/Keepers. “Nothing under that name,” the operator said.

“Maybe I’m spelling it wrong,” I pleaded, “anything under
Ph
instead of
F, Qu
instead of
K?
”

“I don’t show anything, ma’am. Check the spelling. Have a nice day.”