The Diamond Lane (30 page)

“There's hope, in other words,” said Tony, “you're saying there's hope.”

“To the extent that there's no hope, there's hope, is what I'm saying. You ever read
The Plague
?”

“Yes.”

“Read
The Plague
, you'll see what I'm saying.”

14

MOUSE THOUGHT THE ACCIDENT HAD CHANGED SHIRL
, just as Dr. Klingston predicted. Her evidence was their driving over the hill to the Valley six-thirty Christmas morning to open presents with Shirl and Auntie Barb.

Shirl demanded that Mimi, Mouse, and Tony come over in bathrobes and pajamas. Any attempt to dissuade her produced a fit of rage or sulking. Mouse and Mimi pleaded. Couldn't we have Christmas at the apartment, then shower and dress and…? Couldn't we at least dress? We'll bring over our presents and we can open everything together….

Shirl, backed by Auntie Barb, who accused Mimi and Mouse of willfully making Shirl's already tough life hell, insisted they go straight from bed to bucket seat without stopping to comb their hair or rinse the sour night taste from their mouths. She wanted them no later than six-thirty, the better to duplicate the inhumane hour Mouse and Mimi used to awaken her and Fitzy, then just her, on the innocent and greedy mornings of Christmas past.

“She's always been a Christmas Nazi,” said Mimi as they jounced over Laurel Canyon. “I don't see anything different this year. It's always one thing or another. She was always after Ivan to dress up like Santa. You can imagine Ivan as Santa.” No way was she, Mimi, going to drive anywhere in her highly unreliable Datsun in a
bathrobe
. She wouldn't even take the garbage out in her Ugly Pants, the brown Stretch Levi's for Gals Shirl
had saddled her with
last
Christmas. This morning, after her run and a Merry Christmas wakeup call to Ralph, she put on paint-speckled gray sweats and a T-shirt. She put on makeup – only enough to look normal, not beautiful – and brushed her teeth. She still had a warrant for her arrest out on account of all her parking tickets, and was not about to get pulled over by a cute cop, then hauled off to jail in a patrol car, Clearasil dotting her face, her rotting coffee-stained robe flapping open as she was marched up the courthouse steps. Shirl would just have to be unhappy. She, Mimi, would just have to suffer being accused of ruining Shirl's day. She would be anyway. After all, it was Christmas.

There was no traffic, save a few hyperoutfitted, tortured bicyclists with stringy overworked flanks pumping up the hill. The air was tinged with the smell of ponderosa pine, the sky white with dry desert cold. Later, it would be as warm as any late spring day.

Unlike Mimi, Mouse liked Christmas. It was the one day a year when she didn't feel compelled to think up ways to raise money for her documentaries. It was a true holiday. She dangled her arm out the window, hand patting the breeze. The day she bought her new green silk blouse she also splurged on a lavish purple terrycloth bathrobe with a hood.

Tony wore a brown-and-gold silk dressing gown his mother had sent him from Hong Kong. He sat wedged in the backseat, his knees thrust under his chin, next to two shopping bags full of packages whose elaborate bows were getting flatter and flatter by the minute. The temperature between Mouse and Tony made the chilly morning seem Saharan by comparison.

“This is the kind of Christmas we'd try to sneak in a swim. We'd take off our black patent-leather shoes and our anklets – remember those anklets with the little lace trim? We'd stand on the first step in the shallow end of the lagoon, remember?” asked Mouse.

“We'd yell inside to Shirl and Fitzy, ‘It's really warm,'” said Mimi.

“‘I'll bet it is.' Fitzy would say, ‘I'll bet it is.' Then we'd say, ‘No,
really
. It's
really
, really
warm
.' We'd yell, ‘Would you be mad if we accidentally fell in?'”

“We never yelled it,” said Mimi. “I just did it. One time I pretended you pushed me.”

“We never did it,” said Mouse, “we only
threatened
.”

“I did it,” said Mimi. “It was the year we had the twin dresses.”

“We always had twin dresses,” said Mouse.

“Yeah, with lots of lace. I looked like the Incredible Hulk, and Mouse was all cute and girly.”

“I was never girly,” said Mouse, pleased to be thought so.

“Sounds like I missed a smashing time,” said Tony.

“It
was
a smashing time,” said Mouse. “You don't have to be sarcastic.”

“I wasn't being sarcastic.”

Even in Africa, Christmas had always reminded Mouse of Fitzy. Every year the memory seemed more pleasant and less tinged with pain, which in turn made Mouse sad that he had been dead so long.

When Mouse was small, it was tradition to go to work with Fitzy on Christmas afternoon. He was owner and sole proprietor of Fitzy's, a bar on then tawdry Ventura Boulevard. It was egg-yolk yellow on the outside, with no windows and had a gaudy green neon sign screaming
FITZY'S
, a blinking shamrock dotting the
i
. Mimi never went with Fitzy to work, Christmas afternoon or any other time. Mimi said Fitzy's looked like a place you'd go if you wanted to get knifed.

Fitzy's had catered to salesmen who sold vacuum cleaner attachments or World Book Encyclopedias out of their cars and to unhappy husbands, Irish five generations back, who'd stop in on their way home to their over-air conditioned tract houses in Van Nuys. The Valley was still the sticks, then, in 1962, hot, dull, and dusty. People living in houses that had since been demolished to make way for a minimall raised chickens in their
backyards and sold pomegranates and avocados from their own trees to local markets.

Shirl had been ashamed of Fitzy's. So had Mimi. In grade school all Mimi's friends' fathers were businessmen who conducted mysterious, inexplicable “business” all day long in dress-up clothes. Fitzy wore no-iron golf shirts and was proud of the fact he cleaned the Gents' and the Ladies' with his own angry-pink dishpan hands. He hired losers who often robbed him.

The family always seemed to have money in the summer, during hot spells, around St. Patrick's Day, and at Christmas. In February they were always poor, a fallout from Fitzy's best customers' New Year's resolutions. His business was seasonal, Mouse insisted when her mother and sister complained, a word she used before she was quite sure what it meant.

Fitzy's opened at four o'clock on Christmas. Mouse would sit under the bar on the brass footrail, reading the old Atlas he kept in the drawer of his desk under the phone books and drinking Shirley Temples with two cherries.

One Christmas, one of the sad vacuum-cleaner-attachment salesmen, a regular who'd had a turkey carving-related argument with his wife and needed a drink, asked her what she was doing down there.

“Hiding from Mommy and Mimi,” she said. The salesmen said he was hiding from Mommy, too. He gave her a tiny candy cane from his pocket, sticky with fine blue lint.

Fitzy roared with laughter and slapped his stomach. Mouse recognized what he called his hail-fellow-well-met laugh. It was a special laugh for the bar. At home he was quiet and read history books with yellow pages and tiny print.

“'This poor child! She's the different one, she is. Her sister and mother – you know how most women are – why say something in ten words when you can use a hundred?”

“When you can use a thousand!” said Mouse.

“When you can use a million!” said Fitzy.

“When you can use a katrillion-willion!” said Mouse.

“She exaggerates, just like her old man.” Fitzy laughed until he nearly choked.

“I never ever 'zaggerate,” said Mouse.

“Poor child.” Fitzy shook his head.

Now, as Mimi pulled into Shirl's driveway, Mouse worried, as she did from time to time, that this fond memory was a myth, something she'd unknowingly invented on a date, at a cocktail party, in the bush, chattering idly to pass a long equatorial night, a careless half-truth fused with a harmless embellishment to create the last clear memory of her father.

Inside, a fire was roaring. It was traditional to have a fire on Christmas regardless of the weather. Mistletoe shriveling from the past week of heat was taped to the center of every doorway. Silver garlands festooned the mantle crowded with angels, elves and Santas fashioned from every conceivable material: pine cones, pantyhose, knitting yarn, magazines folded a clever way taught only in Girl Scouts, then spray-painted gold. Displayed on either end table was Shirl's collection of music boxes and snowstorms-in-a-ball. Tiny blinking lights were strung around the ceiling. Cards hung from two wide red satin ribbons flanking either side of the dining room. There was a crocheted Santa toilet paper cover in the bathroom, snowball guest soap, and candy-cane hand towels.

There were stockings for each of them. The sisters had their own red felt ones, with “Mimi” and “Mouse” written on them in green glitter, most of which had been rubbed off. Shirl had made a green felt stocking for Tony, his name sparkling in red. A plate of cheese danish sat on the coffee table along with a five-pound box of mixed chocolates someone had sent and a ceramic Santa teapot and four matching ceramic Santa mugs. Lorne Greene crooned “Merry Christmas Neighbor” on the stereo. Lorne Greene had been Fitzy's most famous customer.

“You're supposed to be in your jam-jams!” Shirl wailed as Mimi kissed Shirl on the cheek. Shirl's hair had grown back board-straight. It clung to her head like a bathing cap.

“This is what I sleep in,” said Mimi. “I couldn't afford a robe.”

“You should have told me, I'd have picked up one for you. Tony, dear, you can just put those anywhere under the tree. It's so nice to have a man to play Santa again! Do you recognize that on the hi-fi?”

“Lorne Greene?” said Mouse, reaching for a danish.

“It's Lorne Greene, your father's most famous customer. You know he gave that album to your father. It's even autographed. Mouse, honey, use a napkin. Oh, I forgot the napkins. Barb! Barb!”

Auntie Barb appeared in the kitchen doorway in a navy blue velour bathrobe holding an empty glass coffeepot, a frown embedded in her long dull face. “You're late,” she said.

“Barb, dear, would you get us some napkins.”

“The breakfast napkins or the dinner napkins?”

“The ones with the holly on them. Remember, we bought them at –”

“We put them back. The breakfast napkins should be fine.”

“It's a holiday, we should use the dinner ones.”

“– maybe just some paper towels,” said Mouse, her cheek bulging with pastry.

“Paper
towels
,” yowled Shirl. “I can't believe a girl getting married would even consider paper
towels
on
Christmas
. Tony, you look so elegant, just like, who was that, Mimi, honey, in
The Thin Man
?”

“William Powell,” said Mouse, wiping her fingers on the sleeves of her purple terrycloth robe, the important issue of the napkins mysteriously and suddenly forgotten. She settled back in the couch, pulled up the hood of her robe, tucked each hand inside the other wide sleeve.

“My fiancée, the druid,” said Tony, trying for a shared smile. While the robe fit Mouse, the hood had been designed for someone with a head the size of a prizewinning watermelon. She tipped her head back so she could glare at him from under the front of it, which fell down over her eyes and rested on the bridge
of her nose. She found it irritating how he resorted to witticisms when things were not going well between them.

“No, Robert Young,” said Mimi. “Shirl, pass the chocolates, but just let me eat one.”

“Nothing like a nice little diabetic shock before breakfast is my motto,” said Tony. “Toss me one, Mouse, no nuts.”

“No, it was someone else. Barb! Who was it in
The Thin Man
?”

“Mom, it was William Powell,” said Mouse.

“It was not William Powell,” said Mimi.

“Well, it wasn't Robert Young.”

“It wasn't Robert Young, but it
wasn't
William Powell.”

“Barb! Come in so we can open our gifts. Tony, will you do the honors? Find one for each of us, then we go around in a circle, beginning with Mouse. She opens hers, then Mimi, then me, then you, then Barb. Barb! Where the hell is she?” Shirl half rose in her chair, turned, and addressed the kitchen.

“She's outside, Mrs. FitzHenry.”

Through the sliding glass door they watched Auntie Barb by the lagoon retrieving cookies from where they were cooling on squares of paper towels laid out on the diving board, a red and green metal tin clutched in her long veiny hand. She bent stiffly from the waist, plucked up each cookie between two fingers and placed it in the tin. The expression on her face suggested someone who had nailed a large spider with a wad of Kleenex and was depositing it in the toilet. She brought in the cookies and placed them on a stack of magazines next to the danish and the chocolates. “These are made with hazelnuts from Oregon. Even though California fashions itself as the cuisine capital of the West you can't get a decent hazelnut here if your life depended on it.”