The Days of Anna Madrigal (3 page)

He had just turned sixteen, though. There was still time to figure it out.

“You there, lamb?” Margaret was cooing from outside his door, so he invited her in. She was wearing a calf-length green velvet gown that was balding in places like the arm of an old settee. Her palomino hair was now loosely corralled on top of her head with bobby pins. She was holding a parcel about the size of a shoe box, wrapped in the funny papers and tied up with twine.

“Guess what's playin' at the American next week.”

“What?” he replied, before snatching an answer out of the blue: “Charlie Chan.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed, setting the parcel beside her. “Much better—Jeanette MacDonald!”

“Oh,” he said, remembering. “
San Francisco
.” He had passed the glass-encased poster on his way to Eagle Drugs, but the chance of laying eyes on the Basque boy again had dulled its impact considerably. “With Clark Gable.”

“ ‘Together for the first time,' ” said Margaret, quoting the poster.

Andy did not much care for Clark Gable, with his big tombstone teeth and wooden ways, even if he
had
starred in
The Call of the Wild
. (It was the dog that Andy had most admired in that film.) Jeannette MacDonald, on the other hand, was ladylike elegance itself and not to be missed under any circumstances.

“Wonder if she sings,” he said.

“I expect so.” Margaret gave him a winsome smile. “Wanna go on Saturday?”

“Sure.”

“'Less you've got a chum you'd rather take.”

“No.”

She clamped her hands on her knees and stood up. “Well, then—okay. It's a date.” She headed for the door, leaving the parcel behind on the bed.

“What's that?” he asked.

She stopped in the doorway and silenced him with a finger to her lips. “Happy birthday, lamb. Latch the door behind me.”

His heart was pounding wildly as he obeyed her order, pushing the metal hook into the rusty eye on the doorframe. He had used this latch hundreds of times before without giving it a second thought, but now, with the din of strangers rising from the parlor, it struck him as woefully inadequate for any secret worth keeping.

He went to the bed and sat where Margaret had sat, pulling the parcel into his lap. It was soft and squishy, obviously fabric, but lighter than the woolen shirt she had made him last Christmas or even the seersucker suit of an earlier birthday. The twine on the parcel was so tightly knotted that he finally gave up the effort and tore a hole in the newspaper—a
Maggie and Jiggs
comic in which Maggie, as usual, was chasing Jiggs with a rolling pin. Within seconds he had liberated the contents, a billowing cloud of lemon silk chiffon printed with roses in pale pinks and greens.

The betrayal blooming in his lap made his eyes dart to the door again. The latch was still firmly in place, but true reassurance came in the fact that Mama had turned off the Victrola and started playing the piano. That meant folks would stay put for a while. She was playing her favorite song, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

He rose and went to the corroded mirror on the back of his closet door. The gown was long and sleeveless. There were cape-like flounces at the shoulders and hand-rolled seams at the neckline, all of it diaphanous as a dream from which he was sure to wake at any moment. He slipped it over his head as Mama began to sing.

They asked me how I knew my true love was true

I of course replied something here inside cannot be denied . . .

The tissue-fine silk slid down Andy's body like a lover's whisper.

Chapter 3

ONE GUESS

T
he RV park was a patch of asphalt wedged between the highway and the Pacific. Shawna found her dad's Winnebago easily enough, since he had rescued it from beige anonymity by slapping a Grateful Dead decal on the back. The RV was pointed toward the ocean, practically hanging ten off a crumbly cliff, and its view of the surf was clearly the reason he had chosen this particular park. There was not much to be said for Pacifica itself, a fog-bruised little suburb-by-the-sea, fifteen miles south of San Francisco, that seemed resigned to its mildew and plywood.

She rapped on the door several times, but no one responded, so she pulled her cell from her bag and called him.

“Hey, baby girl. You here?”

“Yep. Where are you?”

“In the laundry room.”

Shawna chuckled. By his own account, her dad had once made a practice of picking up women in Laundromats. In fact he had picked up her mom in one, her biological mom, that is—the legendarily louche Connie Bradshaw—though Brian was not her biological father. (That honor fell to some dude Connie had met at the Us Festival, whatever that was.) Brian and his wife Mary Ann had inherited Shawna—and that was the right word—after Connie died of eclampsia in the hospital. Knowing she was dying, she had left her little girl to her “best friends,” though their credentials had been skimpy at best. Brian had slept with Connie a few times, and Mary Ann, a fellow Clevelander, had crashed at Connie's apartment upon arrival in San Francisco. They both liked her, but she had never been their best friend. Brian, however, had fervently wanted a baby, so he regarded the infant Shawna as a serendipitous wonder. Mary Ann, not so much. After seven years of trying, she gave up completely and made Brian a single dad. A happy one, eventually.

Strangers tended to find this history confusing, but Shawna valued it greatly, and ached to know more about Connie. Mary Ann remembered little beyond the fact that Connie overused the word
fantabulous
. Brian said Connie cried after the sex the night they met, since nobody knew it was her birthday. He had cheered her up by sticking lit matches in a peanut butter sandwich and calling it a cake.

Her dad was a very sweet man. Always had been.

“Doing laundry?” she asked teasingly. “Did you get lucky?”

“Har dee har har.”

“Shall I come there?”

“No. I'm on the way. Hang tight.”

In less than a minute he was rounding the corner with a nylon laundry bag slung over his shoulder. That bag and his creased face and the muddle of snowy curls gave him the air of an old salt home from the sea—which, in effect, he was.

He dropped the bag and enfolded her in his arms. She mumbled “Hey, Dad” into his shoulder, catching a whiff of wet wool and some piney-smelling shampoo. She felt a curious sense of homecoming here on this unfamiliar bluff. She hadn't seen him for over a year, when he had parked the RV in Petaluma on his way to Cabo.

“So where is she?” she asked, wondering if her dad's new squeeze was cowering in the RV at this very moment, having chosen not to admit her.

“Taking a hike,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow. “So soon?”

He did not find this funny in the least. “It's good for us,” he said soberly, unlocking the door and leading the way into the RV. “I do it all the time myself. This buggy gets a little cramped sometimes. Even if you're—”

He cut himself off.
In love
, she thought. He wanted to say it, but it would have been too embarrassing at his age to put that enormity into words. He had survived one happily-ever-after, but just barely, and Shawna knew better than anyone how love-shy Mary Ann had made him. Even after all these years.

“I've got fizzy apple juice,” he said, dropping the laundry bag and opening the door of his mini-fridge.

“That's okay. I'm fine.” She collapsed into one of the beige swivel chairs.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

He settled in the other chair. “I talked to Anna last night. She sounded good.”

Shawna shrugged. “She's okay.”

“What the matter?”

“She's ninety-fucking-two, Dad.”

“She's not sick, though?”

“No—just kinda . . . packing up.”

He took that in glumly, saying nothing.

She stroked the arm of the chair, comforting something inanimate in lieu of the more vulnerable human alternative. “We have to honor it, Dad. Anything else would just make her feel alone. We have to—”

She didn't finish, so he did it for her. “ ‘Drive her to the station and wave good-bye.' ” He was quoting Mrs. Madrigal herself. Their long-ago landlady had hit them with that sobering train metaphor a few years back. They were not to make a fuss, she had told them, but she wouldn't mind having “family on the platform.”

Shawna sighed. “How can she be more chill than we are?”

Her dad shrugged. “Always has been. About everything.”

There was a long silence before she said, “Got anything stronger?”

“Stronger than what?”

“Apple juice.”

“Oh . . . sure, kiddo.” He sprang to his feet and pulled a bottle of scotch from the cupboard, filling a couple of café glasses and handing one to her as he sank back into the chair. “Number four on the
Times
list. Worth celebrating!”

She knew he meant that, but something in his smile made her wonder if they
both
had something to share today. If so, it was probably best to let him go first.

“I wanna tell you about Wren,” he said.

Oh shit
.
Here we go. She's younger than I am
.
She's painfully shy. She's a raving fundamentalist who was horrified by my degenerate novel.

“Beautiful name,” she offered at last. “Wren, like the bird?”

“Yeah.” He took a slug of his scotch. “We hooked up on Facebook.”

“Mmm . . . racy.”

“Just shut up and listen, smarty-pants.”

“Okay . . . sorry.”

“Here's the deal: I met her years ago—when you were still a kid, and I was with Mary Ann. We never—you know—did anything, but . . . we had a moment.”

She seriously doubted this. Her dad had a princely heart, and certainly more than a few “moments” over the years—but they had traditionally come
after
he bagged someone, not before. “C'mon, Dad. I don't care if you did anything.”

“You may not care, but I want you to know why we didn't. Sex was the last thing on my mind. I thought I had AIDS, and . . . Wren was wonderful about it. Gallant, really. I never forgot how kind she was.”

That stopped her cold. “Why did you think you had AIDS?”

“I was sleeping with someone who had it. Who died of it.” He hesitated a moment. “It was nothing serious—for either of us. She was just—you know . . .”

“A fuck buddy.”

“Yeah.”

“Did she know about it?”

“Did who know about what?”

“Did Mary Ann know about the fuck buddy?”

“No, never—as far as I know. I was planning to tell her, but . . . she left me. She left
us
. It was kind of a moot point by then.”

“So why have you never told me?” This was what bugged her: he had violated their full disclosure contract. There was nothing he didn't know about
her
, after all, thanks to her former blog,
Grrrl on the Loose
. He knew about her playmates, male
and
female, during her undergraduate days at Stanford. He knew about her stint selling dildos at Mr. S Leathers, and the peep show in North Beach where—briefly, very briefly, for journalistic purposes—she had dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl and diddled herself in a booth for the pleasure of customers at the Lusty Lady. He knew about her bout with chlamydia, for fuck's sake. It wasn't fair. His unnecessary little secret left her feeling oddly betrayed.

“I'm not some delicate flower, Dad.” She took a sturdy sip of her scotch, as if to prove the point.

“I know. I should have told you, but—there was very little reason to bring it up. I thought that chapter was closed forever.”

“Until—what? You saw her on Facebook?”

“YouTube, actually.”

“Doing
what
?”

“She was on
Johnny Carson
—once upon a time.” He gazed at her like a soulful spaniel. “Do you even remember Johnny Carson?”

“I'm twenty-nine, Dad, not twelve. What was she doing on Johnny Carson?”

“She was a model. A big one. A large one, I mean.” He made an expansive gesture with his hands.

“Like—plus size?”

“Yeah, except they didn't have 'em back then. Wren was sort of a pioneer. She was all over the tube for a while.
Carson
. The
Donahue Show
. They called her ‘The World's Most Beautiful Fat Woman.' ”

She was certain he was fucking with her. “Shut the front door.”

When Shawna was a kid, her dad had claimed that there were miles of secret tunnels under Chinatown, that some of the city's wild parrots were over a hundred years old, that Coit Tower had been designed to resemble the nozzle of a fire hose. These were widespread San Francisco myths, so her dad had left them blithely unchallenged. He had been more committed to her amusement than to the truth.

“I'll show you the YouTube,” he said flatly.

There was no arguing with that. “So . . . where did you meet her?”

“At the Russian River. I was waiting for the results of my AIDS test. It took a couple of weeks back then, and I didn't wanna . . . I mean, it would have been awkward with Mary Ann, since we were still very . . . you know, sexually active.”

She left that alone.

“So Michael took me under his wing. He had already tested positive himself, so we went up to the river together. He met Wren at a gay resort.”

“She was bi, you mean?”

He shook his head. “She just liked being recognized. She was very big with the gay guys.”

“So to speak.”

“That's just the sort of joke
she
would make.”

He was sounding a little defensive, so Shawna tried to make amends. “She sounds cool, Dad. I'm not throwing shade.”

Pokerfaced, he regarded her for a moment. “I'm sure I'd find that comforting, if I knew what it meant.”

She smiled and translated: “I wasn't trashing her, Dad. C'mon. I used ‘throwing shade' in the novel.”

“You used lots of things in that novel. I just don't speak Elvish.”

She flinched, since some reviews of
pvt msg
had been similarly snide. Mostly the boomer critics, of course, who had come late to the party, and were pissed off that someone so young and unknown had written a novel composed entirely of text messages. They mocked the cryptic slang and the soullessness of the lowercase abbreviations as if those devices had been totally unintentional. She had hoped, at the very least, to be recognized as a new experimentalist, but they had treated her more like a Kardashian than a Kerouac.

“Did you really hate it?” she asked.

Funny how his opinion still mattered the most.

“C'mon, Shawna, I loved it. I couldn't stop reading it. I told you that already. I just don't understand all the words.”

She was feeling way too needy now, so she let it drop. “Anyway, I think it's great that you've found someone. I'm thrilled for you.”

A slow, sleepy smile from the old man. “Totes?”

“Yep . . . totes.”

“See? My lingo's improving.”

“Did you learn that in
pvt msg
?”

He gave her a crooked grin. “You think people talk that way around here?” He gazed out the window at the sea where the fog was finally lifting. The pewter skies were slashed open along the horizon, revealing innards of startling blue. Turning back to her, he said, “So what do you think? Do I look like a husband?”

She saw her opening and took it. “More like a grandfather, actually.”

He drew back. “Well . . . thanks for that.”

“No,” she said, smiling. “I mean . . . how would you like that?”

His brow was still furrowed in confusion.

“I'm gonna have a baby, Dad!”

She'd been prepared for any number of reactions, but not the look of abject horror that transformed her father's face before he snatched the glass of scotch from her hand. “What the hell are you doing, then?”

“No, no.” She found his panic attack endearing. “I'm not pregnant now. I'm just planning on it.”

“Planning on it,” he echoed, collecting himself.

“I wanna be a mom, Dad. And I wanted you to be the first to know. I think I'd be good at it . . . and I've made enough money from the novel to support us.”

“Us being . . . you and the baby?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a boyfriend I don't know about? A girlfriend?”

“Nope.” She smiled placidly. “Not a one.”

“So . . . not the clown guy.”

“No. That's been over for years. And, for the record, he wasn't a clown guy, he was a clown.”

This was followed by a silence that could genuinely be described as pregnant. Finally her dad said, “So . . . we're talking . . . insemination?”

She nodded. “Thanks for not saying ‘artificial.' I hate that.”

“No . . . it's just as real as the other kind, I guess. Just more purposeful.” He was trying his best to be hip about this, and Shawna was touched by the effort.

“Anyway,” she said. “It's not like I'm afraid of single parenthood. I know I'd be good at it. I had the best role model in the world.”

He shrugged off the compliment, then gulped down the rest of his scotch. “So how do you go about this? A sperm bank or something?”