The Diamond Lane (7 page)

Mouse and Mimi were thirteen and fourteen then. Shirl justified spoiling them with this because they had no father. It was a cold night, a freezing night. Their seats were in the next-to-the-last row, All they could make out onstage were four bouncing, clothespin-thin figures with hair. All they could hear were other girls their own age shrieking and crying. They didn't care. They shrieked and cried, too. It kept them warm. Shirley sat in her op-art dress with her hands clamped around her prickly elbows. Shirley had very dry skin. “You'll remember this one day and thank me,” she promised, her teeth chattering between light-pink lips. When Paul McCartney sang what they thought was “Yesterday,” even she had cried.

Mimi rested her forearms on the steering wheel and sighed. It was happening already. She knew how it went from when Fitzy died. Everything and anything remotely related to Shirl would now remind her of how it was before the Accident. She would be unable to look at a jar of Cheez Whiz, Shirl's favorite snack, without being racked with sadness. She would be unable to drive through Laurel Canyon or any of the passes. They would all remind her of Shirl and the Beatles.

SITTING IN A
hospital waiting room waiting for word of someone you love, someone whose head was just drilled into, someone who's been beaned with a ceiling fan.

It was seven-fifteen.

Mimi sat in a loveseat, her chin hovering inches above her knees. The waiting room was done in sea blues and lavender. Two loveseats and a square glass coffee table,
National Geographic
s like thin fallen dominoes. Fiber wall-hangings and a framed poster of a tan, non-brain damaged couple strolling on a luscious beach. It was a nice waiting room. It reminded Mimi of the inside of an airplane.

At seven-thirty she hauled herself out of the loveseat and approached the nurse at the desk. The nurse had thick wrists and a crooked part, a wide white river bisecting the brown crown of her big head. The nurse would not look up. She was making out wedding shower invitations in a tight, hostile hand. Mimi asked the crooked part when she could see her mother.

“Mrs. FitzHenry is out of surgery and resting comfortably. Dr. Klingston will be with you when he can.”

“When will she be able to go home, do you know?” Mimi asked. She wanted to get the nurse to look up, so she could see if her eyes were filled with the special type of pity reserved for the relatives of the terminally ill, as opposed to just the temporarily hospitalized.

“Dr. Klingston will discuss that with you,” she said.

Mimi sank back into the loveseat.

If she's out of surgery and resting comfortably, what's the surgeon doing? Trading war stories with the boys by the water cooler? She tried to think what it was they did after surgery on television. Washed up, traded witty dialogue with the female love interest, also the scrub nurse. Unless the relatives of the patient were important to the plot, they were characterized as pitiful but superfluous.

She stared up at the television, bracketed to the ceiling. It was bigger and nicer than the one she had at home. It was turned to a cable station. She imagined they tried to stay away from the news and hospital shows. On the screen just then was a cheap game show that looked as though it was filmed in someone's garage. There were two categories from which the contestants could choose their questions: Women Who Love Younger Men and Antibiotics. The contestants all had shiny faces.

A man came and sat across from Mimi on the edge of the other loveseat. Out of her peripheral vision he looked okay. He looked good. A little too beach boy for her taste, but you never knew. You had to give people a chance. His hairline was only slightly receding. He wore a striped polo shirt, and had a bright-blue coil of what looked like rock-climbing rope slung over his knee. The important thing was that he looked over twenty-five, straight, and
not
in the film business. She crunched up her stiff blond curls.

They both watched the game show.

“Streptomycin,” he said.

Mimi wondered what his tragedy was. Maybe his wife fell off the side of a mountain.

“Barbra Streisand,” said Mimi.

Their eyes met across the
U.S. News & World Report
s.

“Are you Mimi FitzHenry?” he asked.

No, better if he's divorced.

“How do you know?” she asked lightly. She glanced over at the nurse with the crooked part, only half visible from behind
the counter. She could hear the pen scratching fiercely. Maybe he'd spotted her and asked the nurse her name.

“What do you do?” he asked.

She liked a man who was direct. “Have you heard of Talent and Artists? I work with Solly Stein. We represent directors and writers. What do you do?” she asked, trying to make it sound provocative.

“I'm Dr. Klingston.”

“Oh, hi! Hello!” Her face boiled with embarrassment. “I'm Mimi, Shirl's daughter. How, how –” She had only talked to him on the telephone. She slammed her knees together, arched her back, and struggled up from the loveseat. She shook his hand.

“– there was a fracture, as we suspected. Not much we can do for that. Got her on Dilantin, a seizure preventive. There was also a small epidural clot, which we evacuated. As far as the subdural goes, we'll have to wait. They generally don't manifest themselves for a month or so after the trauma.”

“She's not, uh, dying?”

“She'll be fine. Though there might be some memory loss, perhaps a slight personality change.”

“Personality change? We're not talking
Sybil
here are we?”

The electronic doors swept open, admitting a man in suede shorts, plaid shirt, and hiking boots. He wore a red and white bandanna around his neck and a few shiny carabiners dangling from a belt loop. It was an Outfit. He bounded up to Dr. Klingston. “Hiya, Gary. Ready to bag some peaks?”

“Be with you in a minute, Todd.”

“Super. Gals are in the car.” Todd stared up at the television.

“How changed will she be?” Mimi noticed that Dr. Klingston's mustache disguised the fact he had no lips. She didn't trust a man with no lips. He glanced up at the television set. There were two new categories: Great Dictators and Reptiles. She wished they could talk in private. “Will she be able to do her découpage? Where you get a picture and, well, she likes to burn the edges, but you don't have to, and then –”

“Giant salamander,” said Todd.

“Sure, sure. There may be some giddiness, headaches. We'll have to keep an eye out. Some big exec from one of the movie studios was in here six months ago. Brain tumor size of a tangerine. Took half of his frontal lobe, he was doing a movie a month later.”

“That Mack Stoner?” asked Todd. “Got a deal with Mack Stoner is why I ask.”

MIMI FOUND SHIRL
with a turban of snowy gauze wrapped tightly around her skull, eavesdropping on her neighbor. Her cheek was covered with a square of gauze. After the fan had struck her head it glanced off the side of the table, sending her just poured cup of scalding coffee into the air, splashing her cheek as she fell off her chair and onto her wrist. Her cheek was burned, her wrist broken.

She was sitting up, her head cocked toward the plastic curtain drawn between the beds. Shirl was a famous eavesdropper. In restaurants, ladies' rooms, and beauty salons, and now, Mimi saw with relief, hospital rooms. The cheap curtain provided the illusion of privacy. The people on the other side were foreign. They were talking loudly about suppositories.

Mimi had not expected her mother to be sitting up. She thought there'd be tubes, high-tech monitors, sunken cheeks, and black eyes. Instead here was her mother as she might appear sitting at the kitchen table, wearing a white version of the orange turban she normally wore the day before her weekly hair appointment. The orange turban had coins on it. Even Shirl had a sense of how silly it was. She wore it only inside the house.

“Mom!” said Mimi. “God, you look really terrific. I just saw the doctor –”

Shirl's faded brown eyes slid toward the curtain. “The wife of the caviar czar of the Valley,” she whispered. “He, the husband, imports for all the stars. He had a polyp in his nose.”

“Oh right. We have a bunch of clients who buy from him.”

“I forget you're always mingling with the stars,” Shirl said. She rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders, which caused her to wince.

“How are you feeling?”

“Don't ask me that. You don't ask a girl who's just had brain surgery that. Sore. My wrist hurts more than my head. It was divine intervention. I was about to go off program, don't you know? I'd ordered those white chocolate dumplings in strawberry soup.”

“What program?”

“Weight Watchers.” She tugged at the roll around her waist through the blanket. “I hate it.”

“You look all right. You look like you never had surgery,” said Mimi.

“I'm dying,” said Shirl.

“You are not dying. He said you're doing terrific.”

“He's good looking, the surgeon.”

“He was sort of coming on to me. I mean, here I was trying to find out how you were and he was giving me the eye.”

“When Mimi sets her cap for a fella, look out,” said Shirl.

“Please be quiet!” came a foreign voice from the other side of the shower curtain. “Sick peoples here.”

Shirl patted the side of her head gently. “It itches like hell. I've got the nubs already. At least this solves what to do with my hair. You know I'm against coloring it, even though on you girls it looks fine.” Even though Mouse had been gone for almost sixteen years, Shirley still said, “you girls.” “That's a nice blond on you.”

“Thanks.”

The thought crossed Mimi's mind that maybe her mother was dying. That the lipless, rock-climbing Dr. Klingston was lying, or humoring her. Now that she'd adjusted to the hospital bed and turban, Mimi saw that her mother didn't look exactly herself. She was bloated, her olive skin flushed. There were webs of broken capillaries on her nose, and crêpey pouches under
her eyes, which Mimi had never noticed before. The whites of her eyes were too glittery. Opalescent. Drugs, thought Mimi. Morphine or something.

It bothered Mimi that Shirl had been so unlucky. Accidents happened to people who attracted them. Hadn't Fitzy been depressed for months before he died? Hadn't business been down? Shirl had thought so. Shirl had confided to her little girls that their father was a magnet for misfortune. She had proof. Appliances that broke. Get-rich-quick schemes that only got them poorer quicker. An accident waiting to happen, that was Fitzy. Hapless and melancholy, his middle names. She should have known better than to marry a cleft-chinned black Irishman, Shirl always said. She laughed when she said it, but it was true.

Shirl was the opposite. She said everything she thought and thought everything she believed in was beyond reproach. She was untroubled and stalwart as a Maine woodsman, a true exotic to her friends, all beautiful, ambivalent Southern Californian matrons.

People set their clocks by Shirley FitzHenry. She lived in the same bungalow on Cantaloupe Avenue in Sherman Oaks for thirty-eight years. She had been watching the soap opera
As the World Turns
for twenty. Every year since the Korean War Shirl had her New Year's Day party and sent out Groundhog Day cards. Every year she bought illegal fireworks in Tijuana for the Fourth of July, and put away all her white clothes the day after Labor Day. Year in, year out, she got smashed at her own dinner parties and waltzed with herself around the swimming pool, singing either “Yellow Bird” or “
Ave Maria
.”

Mimi hated the idea that the universe was perhaps paying her back for her incaution. That her mother should have been peering over her shoulder all this time instead of blithely telling off the timid Jehovah's Witnesses who came to the door and eating butter instead of margarine.

Shirl lay back on the pillows and closed her eyes. Mimi stared at her crinkled bluish eyelids. She was afraid of the
silence. Hematomas formed themselves in silence, never when you were yukking it up.

“I talked to Mouse,” she said.

“My little world traveler. Does she still have that disease? You know, that fungus that makes her fingernails turn green?”

“She's coming home,” said Mimi. “I thought she'd want to see –”

“She's coming home? Not because of
me
.”

“What do you think? Of course because of you. There she is running all around bum-fuck Egypt Africa while you're here –”

“Shhh, they may be Egyptian over there,” she said without opening her eyes. She rolled her head toward the curtain.

“I thought you said it was the wife of the caviar king.”

“Czar, caviar czar.”

“I thought you'd want to see her. It was pretty easy to track her down. You know, I call long distance all over the world for Solly. She's in Zah-ear. She got married.”

Shirley's eyes flew open. She sat straight up and said loudly, “Married? Mouse married?”