The Violet Hour: A Novel (14 page)

“Of course she’s not all right,” Cassandra babbled, answering her own question.

“I’m sorry.” Kyle was grim. “I don’t know what to say. She’s having a tough time.”

Mustering her maternal comfort, she squeezed his arm. “You’re a sweet boy. I know you’ll be there for her.”

Kyle ducked his head and walked heavily up the stairs to his room.

“Oh,” Cassandra said. He stopped, one leg poised to take the next step, and turned his head like a warrior on a mission he knows will be his last. “Estella and Max are on couches tonight. So you’ve got that bed to yourself.”

Kyle nodded nobly. “Good night.”

“Good night, Kyle.”

She went into the bathroom and squeezed a smear of toothpaste onto her electric brush, then stood back and watched it buzz across her teeth in the mirror. Her face was webbed with tiny blood vessels,
the hollows beneath her eyes shaded as if with a pencil. She didn’t look well. Or rather, she looked about as well as she could expect under the circumstances. What surprised her was that she also looked mean, her pupils hard, her jawline unnaturally clenched. Mean, like a mom who needs to tell her kids how to be, who enjoys stopping other people from having fun. Not at all the good listener and sympathetic hugger, the easygoing, laughing mom who really gets it—the mom she’d always been. Or thought she’d been, anyway. Wanted to be. She rinsed her toothbrush and put it back on its little charging stand, then flicked the light switch and went across the hall to her bedroom, opening the door a crack.

She might have let him sleep with her daughter. With Howard dead, it didn’t seem anyone would care. But Elizabeth’s whispered rebuke had made her feel protective.
Don’t touch me.
If that was, in fact, what she’d said. Whatever had occurred between them, she knew her daughter. She was a fragile creature, her Elizabeth, and Kyle was perhaps too clumsy to be much comfort. A lion’s paw could easily crush a kitten, even if it meant to be kind.

The room was dark but she could see in the blade of light from the hallway that Elizabeth was curled up on her side under a blanket, facing away from the door. She didn’t move when Cassandra came in, but Cassandra couldn’t tell if that was because she was already sleeping soundly—Elizabeth did have a knack for it, falling right off on airplanes, and even, as a teenager, at her desk, with a lamp still blazing in her face—or just pretending because she didn’t want to talk.

Well, Cassandra would let her pretend. The world would be a much more pleasant place if everyone were allowed to pretend a bit more. She undressed in the dark and when she finally slid under the blanket, Elizabeth shifted slightly, as though consciously or unconsciously making room for her mother in the bed. Cassandra turned to face the back of her daughter’s head, and as her eyes adjusted, the redness of Elizabeth’s ponytail emerged from the dark, triumphant and familiar as ever.

A
s a kid, Elizabeth had always had projects. A Saturday in autumn and she was creating a play. One of her friends was over, a waifish brunette named Jessica who spoke in complete, overly enunciated sentences that just weren’t normal in a twelve-year-old girl. She had a bubble head and large, ferocious brown eyes, and was famous for her endless straight A’s. A dark version of Elizabeth, as much her rival as she was her friend.

“
Frenemy,
” Mary had once told her on the phone. “You never had one? I had lots.” After that conversation, Cassandra tried out the word, whispering it under her breath as she wiped down the bathroom vanity. It was too cute for what it seemed to mean. She couldn’t say it without wrinkling her nose.

Even the girl’s name, Jessica—never Jessie or Jess—suggested a precocity that made Cassandra uncomfortable. As though she were the child and Jessica the adult. The girls had spent the better part of the afternoon in Elizabeth’s room, singing and thumping around. Trying to stay out of the way, Cassandra retreated to her attic studio to work on a series of bowls for the PTA auction, so that Elizabeth and Jessica and all their classmates could partake in the traditional seventh-grade camping trip at the Angelo Coast Range Reserve. Jessica’s parents
were scientists at Cal, so she, she could not help mentioning, had already been there once.

But now the girls were before her in the studio. Elizabeth tilted her head and made a screwy face, like a character in an after-school sitcom. She was such a ham, a perfect mimic. A perfect everything as a matter of fact.

“Cool bowls, Mom,” Elizabeth said.

“Thanks, Liz. What do you want?”

“No, really. Aren’t they, Jessica?”

Jessica regarded Cassandra’s workstation neutrally. “They’re great.”

The bowls were round and blue-glazed, with streaks of earthy tan and white. Just the sort of thing the school’s mothers went mad to serve ice cream in. Cassandra had seen similar bowls in numerous East Bay shops, which was how she got the idea. She could’ve sold these in those shops, and maybe she’d think about it after the auction, if she could bear the boring week it would take to toss off several more sets.

“Well, they’re coming together.”

Elizabeth traced a wave pattern with her toe along the floor. “Don’t you think you might need something to pack them in? Some Styrofoam or something?”

“I have a whole roll of foam sheeting in the closet.”

“Oh.” Elizabeth looked back at her toe. Jessica was staring at the corkboard Cassandra had hanging by the door. It was covered with postcards, photos, and magazine cutouts. Inspiration for future work. Elizabeth looked up suddenly, bright with a new idea. “Well, what about fabric? Maybe to wrap around the bowls somehow, to present them?” Jessica snapped her head over and nodded.

Cassandra laughed. “Lizzie, I’m not covering my bowls. I want people to bid on them!”

“All right, Mom.” Elizabeth crossed her arms under her chest. She had only recently acquired her first set of bras, earlier than was probably necessary but apparently later than everybody else. The lavender strap of one of her most padded ones slipped out from under her
tank top, bowing coyly along her downy arm. With a huff, she yanked it back. “Here’s the deal.
We
need fabric, and I thought if you were going to the store we could come with you.”

“Hmm. What do you need the fabric for?”

“For our costumes, okay? We’re making togas. That’s all I’m telling.”

“Togas! Now I really can’t wait to see this play.”

“We can do it for you tomorrow,” Elizabeth said. “Which is why we need fabric today.”

“Not to interject, but we have to have at least one dress rehearsal,” Jessica said. Not to
interject
?

“You can’t use sheets? Most people nowadays make togas out of sheets.”

“But we want to cut them.”

“Look,” Jessica barged in. “We made sketches. We’ve planned.” Out of nowhere she produced a sketch pad and feathered its pages for Cassandra like a flip book. Elongated girls with giant, Disney eyes sailed by in various colored-pencil getups. She saw headbands and tendrils and what appeared to be a lyre. Jessica’s work, no doubt.

Cassandra reached out to stop the flying pages. “Let me see.”

But Elizabeth threw herself between them, forcing Jessica to hug the sketch pad to her chest. “After, okay? It’ll spoil it!” Her voice was manic, even jealous. Cassandra almost regretted showing any interest at all. Her daughter’s face was still the face of childhood: moony, cheeky, every expression whirling open like clay on a moving wheel. Yet an early rim of adulthood had already formed. It hovered there in the corners of her large, expressive mouth, which probably would not get any larger, a guideline for the rest of her, still spinning into place.

“Come on, please?” she begged, bouncing on one foot.

T
HE FABRIC STORE
was on San Pablo, well past the yacht club, where Abe often sailed, and sometimes drove her just to look, threatening in
his teasing way to actually buy a boat. She was happy enough on land, on her own well-balanced feet, or in her car, even, trundling down San Pablo with the girls. Elizabeth fanned out across the front seat, her bare feet up on the dash in the free-and-easy mode Cassandra had always relished in her daughter, while Jessica sat primly in the back, gazing out the window at the palm trees and traffic gliding by.

They parked on the corner across from an empty, weedy lot on one side, and a strip mall on the other. A whole crowd of people stood around the bus stop out front. “Well, well,” one of them said as Cassandra guided the girls toward the store, and not for the first time Cassandra couldn’t be sure if this person was approving of her figure or the figures of her daughter and her daughter’s friend.

Inside, the girls were off, not quite running, but not quite walking either, making a great show of holding themselves to a measure of decorum as they veered toward the aisle Cassandra knew they had in mind. Elizabeth’s favorite: the satin aisle, where roll after roll of delicious liquid color lay ready to pour itself by the ream into hungry preadolescent hands. Cassandra hurried to catch up to them. When she finally turned the corner, she found them already flinging themselves about, their eyes darting high and low, crying, “Blue!” and “Pretty!” and “I want to be silver. No, gold!” It was Elizabeth who made this last declaration, and as she spoke, nuzzling up to the roll in question, her cheek actually seemed to catch the hue, as though gold were not just her desire, but also some chemical need. This, Cassandra thought, was a child who knew how much she was loved.

“I don’t know, guys, satin’s pretty tricky to cut.” She said it for show only, because she’d already decided she was going to let them have any fabric they wanted.

They went to the counter with their colors in their arms: sunny gold for Elizabeth and cobalt blue for Jessica, with clover green, and cranberry red, and a plummy shade of purple as well. The woman at the counter was petite and snub-nosed with the liberated air of a retired schoolteacher. “What are you making?” she asked them.

“
Actually,
” Jessica said. “We’re writing a play.” Cassandra
winced at her pedantry. As though merely making something weren’t enough. “These are for the costumes we designed.” Mercifully, she didn’t bring out the sketch pad.

The clerk gave a veteran smile and asked no further questions. “Break a leg,” she said as she slid their plastic bags across the counter.

On the drive home, Cassandra popped a tape into the deck and they all sang along to Joni Mitchell, contending to nail every syllable, pause, and modulation. To her surprise, the girls actually seemed to enjoy the competition. Elizabeth swiveled her head to smile at Jessica, and Jessica beamed back, even as her lips kept moving, straining not to miss a beat. Cassandra wondered if maybe competition was healthy after all, if it did, in fact, as every PE teacher had insisted since the dawn of PE, make you stronger. She saw Jessica blush in the rearview mirror as she wheezed over a line she didn’t have the breath to complete. She gulped for air, her nose crinkling with a hint of self-deprecation, and then came back bravely, openmouthed and joyful, her large eyes closing for an instant as she felt a high note click into place.

She was only a girl, after all, only a girl trying to find her place in the world. And if she needed to enunciate her advanced vocabulary to secure that place, as a smart girl and a good citizen with a bright future still forming ahead, so let her. She was not her daughter’s enemy. She was just like her daughter, her compatriot and friend.

J
ESSICA’S PARENTS TURNED OUT
to have plans the next day, so the whole production was put off another week. In the interim, Elizabeth went to school wearing her bras and enormous backpack, having long stopped letting Cassandra walk her to the bus. Evenings, the fabric came out, still uncut, still full of possibilities. Elizabeth wound it around herself in constricting, mummifying bandages that made it impossible for her to walk down the stairs.

Meanwhile, Cassandra and Abe made their appearance at the PTA’s Saturday night fund-raiser, a semiformal dubbed the Night
of a Thousand Stars. Everyone was encouraged to be “wacky” and “creative” in their attire, so Abe wore a beret and red velvet blazer and Cassandra wore a black flapper dress with fringe from a Halloween costume many years prior. The straps, made of satin, were her private tribute to Elizabeth’s latest scheme.

They carpooled with their back-door neighbors, Steve and Gail, whose older son, Andy, was a year below Elizabeth, and whose taste in garden vines and patio music had been simpatico with theirs for years. Steve had volunteered to drive so that Cassandra, Abe, and Gail could all enjoy themselves more thoroughly. Gail had, by chance, gone to the University of Maryland, like Cassandra, and though they’d never crossed paths in the year they overlapped, in mixed company they often liked to pretend that they were best friends from college, rewriting years of pre-California history in a single jovial lie.

“Abe’s looking fit,” Gail murmured, once they were all out of the car. “Has he been hitting the gym?” Gail looked like Grace Kelly and talked like Barbra Streisand. Her mint-green strapless tulle that evening was one hundred percent Grace.

“He just sails,” Cassandra said, watching the men kick at imaginary pebbles on the asphalt. “Good genes. It isn’t fair.” A chilly breeze set the fringe on her dress swinging. She felt momentarily hollowed out, like she hadn’t had enough to eat.

The cafeteria had been made over, as it was every year, into a more inviting space for adults. Lanterns hung from the rafters and the overhead fluorescents were dark, with rented standing lampposts providing most of the ambient light. Someone handed Cassandra a leaflet itemizing the goods up for grabs, and though she’d scanned a draft of it earlier that week when she dropped off her bowls, she thumbed through the final list now, looking for her entry. There it was, in the midrange bracket. A set of six ceramic bowls by Cassandra Green. Value: $90. Starting bid: $45. Above her entry was a glass pendant necklace on a recycled fiber cord by one of the jewelry-making moms. Below it a hand-knit replica of a mouse dissection by one of the crazy moms whose work Cassandra had seen in those very same
Berkeley shops in which she was considering displaying her bowls. Was this really a market she was prepared to enter? She shuddered and turned the page. Here were the big-ticket items: helicopter ride, dinner at Chez Panisse, handmade guitar, year of weekly homemade desserts. What poor woman had offered that? Someone who was whipping up cupcakes and cookies every week anyway and finally wanted someone to appreciate it? Actually, Cassandra understood the impulse, more than she wanted to.