The French Revolution (9 page)

In the summer of 1994, she began receiving letters in Esmerelda’s handwriting folded over photographs of brown children, a cute girl and a chubby boy smiling and scowling, both with Harold’s bean-shaped eyes. In early August she received a phone call inviting her to supper at the Cliff House, and though she thought she knew better, when Esmerelda reported that her kids were getting into fishing, dropping poles at Lake Merced on weekends and digging for their own night crawlers before school, curiosity got the better of her. Esmerelda met her at the restaurant with a trembling hug and, after confirming Fanny had brought her checkbook, began narrating an eight-course eating extravaganza with tales of her missing husband, her monstrous credit balance, her years-overstayed guest status, the depravity of Little Stockholm hedonism. Her jaw-dropping grocery bill. The final decision of the city’s eviction board, notice served by the sheriff’s department. And the logical point that there were unused bedrooms in Fanny’s house.

“I do not think so, dear,” Fanny said, cooling her after-dinner tea with a nip of gin from her purse. “You are a big girl; you can take care of yourself.”

Esmerelda softly gargled her water. She had forgotten her mother’s snooty refusal to use contractions in speech, as if efficient diction was a mark of baseness.

“Ma, I need help.” Slow, measured tea bag dips. “I do not think it would be a good decision. I do not like changes to my household, and the way things are suit me fine. Your tornado children would create a tremendous ruckus, and why should I put up with it? Besides, you left me in the first place. So.”

Esmerelda dug her nails into her knees and waited for the urge to throw her silverware at her mother’s face to peter out. Eventually: “I didn’t want things to come to this, Ma. I know what you’ve been through, and believe me, I miss Dad too. But I gotta set
things straight. First, I didn’t leave home because I wanted to. I tried to bring the tots home, but you wouldn’t have them—”

Fanny loudly tore open a sugar packet with her teeth and dumped it into her tea.

“—truth is, you’re my only family. I’m in a bad place: my hubby up and vanished; my kids growing up in Orgyville, USA; work all day and kids all night and still not enough cash to cover expenses. And the sheriff’s going to forcibly remove us tomorrow. So, Ma. Please. Let us stay with you.”

Lumps of perspiration lazed on Esmerelda’s brow. Fanny was perplexed—she couldn’t remember the last time Esmerelda had said “please”—and somewhat swayed, her heart the tiniest bit thawed.

“You understand, Esmerelda, I am the boss. Things must remain the way they are. No changes whatsoever. That means you may not replace my classic furniture, or put your hideous modern music on the phonograph, or, heaven forbid, exchange my tasteful stores of clothing with the whoring outfits I see on the streets.”

Ezzie nodded frantically, hair snakes snipping free from her bun.

“My word is final. If I ask you something, I expect it to be done right away. Not after you are done with your pizza or your gallon of ice cream or whatever it may be. Immediately.”

Yes
, said Esmerelda’s shaking eyes,
I’ll carry you on my back over continents and across solar systems if that’s what it takes
.

Fanny extracted a ream of paper from her own massive wool bag and thumped it on the table. “I anticipated that you might want to move back in, and took the liberty of calling my attorney, to have my conditions written out.”

The stack ran fifty pages deep, single spaced, a hard block of information and clauses. Esmerelda flipped through it, scanning first sentences and whistling appreciatively. Whereunto. Whereas. Be it agreed. Whatever. She dipped into her bag and groped for a writing implement.

Fanny swatted her elbows. “Read it first! I thought I drilled some sense into that noggin of yours.”

“I’m moving in, not signing away my life. Ain’t like I’m buying a house.”

“Oh yes you are, dear.” Fanny slipped a butter knife into the sheaf of paper and terraced off the top third. “That is part of the contract, section five. If you choose to relocate yourself and your offspring into my home, you must buy a house to leave. Not just any house either—a house in the city of San Francisco, with a bedroom for each inhabitant, and within three hundred feet of a park. A sound investment. I will not have you squander your money again.”

Outside, a black Town Car glided into the parking lot, piping smooth jazz at a firm volume.

“A house? I work at a copy shop, Ma. Not really in the house-buying income bracket.”

“It is high time for you to own something. This day-to-day nonsense, this absurd employment making photocopies, well, you are walking in place. You need a career, not a job. It is time to buy into something, to set goals and achieve them. The baking was a start, but you let yourself be pulled astray. Get it together, dear. It will make you a stronger, more focused woman. To achieve and accomplish, these are the traits missing from your constitution. Please, moving back in with your mother? It is the life goal of very few people.”

Esmerelda clenched a smile. So many counterarguments burning: she’d just been promoted to assistant manager, what a lot of people called a career
,
thank you, even if it wasn’t exactly the gig she’d always dreamed of; raising her kids right was a goal, a darn good one; and anyway, Fanny hadn’t worked a day in her life, just scooted forward on the life insurance and government checks.

“I am sure that you are thinking about the many ways in which you benefit the world. You have two children, neither of whom appears to be deformed or unhealthy according to the photographs I received. To which I say: welcome to the club,
dear. And what is more, your attitude toward the children appears to be that they are the ropes keeping you tied to the dock. But it is not apparent that you were going to leave the dock in the first place. You require motivation, a destination for your voyage. A house is a practical place to start.”

Esmerelda placed her hand over her mouth and looked up at the ceiling. She counted the chandeliers, then the crystals in the chandeliers, the cuts in the crystals, the scratches in the cuts, most of this imagined, her eyesight not that good. She haronked into the tablecloth and began gathering her allotment of knives and forks for a direct facial attack.

Then the door chime jingled, footsteps cantered their way. A crash, a child’s lethargic whine, and finally the appearance of a four-year-old black girl wearing a formal pink dress and a bow in her hair, carrying a carton of Parliament Menthols poorly wrapped in the newspaper funnies.

“Grandma!” Robespierre placed the cigs beside Fanny’s tea-cup and hugged her leg, just like they’d practiced. “I’m so happy to meet you! You’re even prettier than Mom said!” Robespierre’s eyes fell shivery and teary, and she buried her nose in her grandmother’s jeans. With song ringing in her chest, Fanny enacted a policy decision on the spot: she was done voting Republican down the line, so long as she could write in her granddaughter instead.

A yelp echoed from points unseen, and a boy dressed in corduroys and fire truck suspenders came tromping around the corner, gripping a handle of Beefeater with both hands.

“Gramma!” The Beefeater hit the floor and Marat plowed into Fanny’s lap, his teeth sticking to her knotted sweater.

“And who is this?” Fanny asked, a bit shocked by the boy’s sudden proximity to her skin but adequately charmed by the warmth of human contact.

“Marrraaaa,” the boy blubbed.

“That’s the team,” Esmerelda summed up. “Good kids, obviously, and I’m on the comeback trail. Plus we brought presents.
C’mon, Ma, whaddya say?” She held out her hand like a dying flower.

Fanny slipped into analytic mode, tamping down the flight in her throat and the heat on her lap for a long-range assessment of the situation: the odds that Esmerelda would ever actually fulfill the real estate investment portion of her contract were a stretch; these children were initially quite attractive and friendly, but in the end they were children and would require decades of fussing and income and house policing to shove into adulthood.

A black tar oozed through her head, dropping her internal temperature, a sad and sticky weight. She closed her eyes and waited for the gloom to pass, creating a firm and stationary foundation which enabled the kid in her lap to squirm up into standing and wrap her wool sweater in a tight toddler embrace. She tried to ignore it, still aiming for a dispassionate decision, but then the kid kissed her heavy cheek and mumbled that he loved her and it was pretty much over. Fanny hugged back hard, both hands across his back and her mouth full of his hair, solid in knowing that despite all the uncomfortable parts of cohabitation these kids were here, alive, committed—hers.

The restaurant greeter slid into view, rustling his hands in his pockets. He was a skinny, olive-skinned kid, peach-fuzz mustache and eyes shaped like small envelopes. “How’s your meal?” he asked.

“Fine,” Robespierre said.

“Go away,” added Esmerelda, igniting a fierce smile on Fanny’s face.

“Good, good. Listen.” His head cranking sideways, both hands up and out in a surrendering calm. “As a parent, you know, family, we have an obligation to tell you something.” Two sniffs, then, gravely: “about your boy.”

“What boy?” Fanny barked as Marat’s legs flutter-kicked air.

With a nonchalant Latino nod he said: “We have reports your boy was consuming alcohol on the premises.”

“Excuse me?” Esmerelda woofed, but Fanny had already scooped up a table knife and started hollering:

“What on earth do you think you are doing accusing my handsome grandson of such a thing? What a bunch of baloney—he is only a child! Cease these fabrications, and while you are at it, get your vision checked!” She dipped into her lap and yanked Marat free, then slammed a pile of cash on the table for a tip just north of thirty cents. “Come on, kids. We are going home.”

Holding back giggles, the rest of the family followed Fanny through the main dining room and out the door to the idling Town Car.

“Ma, Slippy Sanders,” Esmerelda peeped. “My boss.”

“Hello.” Slippy nodded warily, ticked he was missing his tee time, only doing this because Esmerelda had threatened to set up her traveling circus in the CopySmart lunchroom otherwise.

“Yes,” Fanny agreed.

“Save the hugs and handshakes for later,” Esmerelda said, flinging herself out of the wheelchair and waddling toward the car like a huge frightened penguin. “A little help?”

A blast of energy and they were all inside, Esmerelda splayed across the backseat and the Gargantuan strapped to the trunk, the doors slamming shut, the sedan gliding at low speed down the hill to Fanny’s house, saccharin saxophone solos swimming out the windows. It wasn’t until evening, after the children were settled in at Fanny’s place and Slippy and Esmerelda had returned to the Presidio for the rest of their belongings, that Fanny broke open the Parliaments and Beefeater and found the seal on the gin broken and a gulp missing. Strange, she thought, casting a sideways glance at the children working on puzzles on the floor, Robespierre finishing up a two-hundred-piece jigsaw and Marat stumped on a puzzle of the fixed-edge board variety, taking more of an interest in rolling on the floor, singing an original tune about dentists and jelly beans, twirling his pinky in his ear, and drooling puddles.

Strange, but not impossible.

She told Esmerelda after they hauled Ezzie’s steamer trunk into the house. “Unlikely,” Esmerelda remarked. “With all the hubbub, there’s probably a logical explanation. Maybe it broke. Maybe I took a swig and can’t remember.” She snorted. “Hell, so what if he did take a sip? He’s feeling his way out in life. It’s not a crime.”

“Actually, it is.” Fanny Wan Twinkle stirred her martini with a crooked fingernail and decided it was high time to invest in a secure home storage container.

Three generations of Van Twinkles under the same flat California roof, Fanny Van Twinkle the resident crackpot chieftain. She smoked two packs of menthols before lunch, watched eight hours of soap operas each day, chased her commercials with gin, and insisted on everything remaining exactly as she’d left it. She did not permit redecoration of Esmerelda’s room, or the guest rooms, or any room; not one article of clothing could be removed, no stuffed animal discarded. Fanny said no to low-flow toilets, diet soda, computers, and cable television; the driveway asphalt was crumbly and decayed; the laurel tree on the sidewalk drooped with dead limbs; the medicine cabinet was packed with pills decades past expiration; everything in boiled suspension since the morning of April 1, 1979, when Harold Van Twinkle last set out for the Farallones in his thirty-two-foot trawler, trailing his green nets for albacore and rockfish.

Rooting through her mother’s old bedroom, Robespierre discovered a broken Easy-Bake Oven, cardboard boxes filled with lace valentines and wilted homework assignments labeled with failing grades, a pile of singleton wide-heeled sandals, a bookshelf full of dog-eared typing manuals. She tabulated all the junk and substandard decorations with deep pride, because it was hers, finally, a room for herself and not her brother.