It looked hopeful, until I saw a house down the street, and prayed, please Jesus, don’t let it be the turquoise one with the yard paved in blacktop behind the chain-link fence.
The social worker parked in front of it. I stared. It was the color of a tropical lagoon on a postcard thirty years out of date, a Gauguin syphilitic nightmare. It was the gap in the chain of deciduous trees that cradled every other house on the block, defiantly ugly in its nakedness.
She glanced at my metal hospital cane, narrowed her small eyes. “You didn’t say she was lame.”
Marvel Turlock led us through her living room dominated by a television set the size of Arizona, where a talk show hostess admonished a huge bearded man with a tattoo, and down a long hall to my new room, a made-over laundry porch with navy-and-green-striped curtains and a ripcord spread on the narrow rollaway bed.
Back in the TV room, the caseworker spread her papers on the coffee table, ready to bare the details of my life to this hardfaced woman, who told me to take Justin out to play in the backyard in a voice that was used to telling girls what to do.
After a while, the toddler came out, a little blond girl with large, transparent blue eyes. She didn’t know how much I feared the color turquoise, that I wanted to vomit thinking of her mother reading my file. If only I could have stayed in the hospital, with a steady Demerol drip.
ED AND MARVEL Turlock were my first real family. We ate chicken with our hands, sucking barbecue sauce off our fingers as if forks had not yet been invented.
We watched TV all through the meal and everybody talked and nobody listened, and I thought about Ray, and Starr, and the last time I saw Davey. My longing seesawed with hot prickling shame. Fourteen, and I’d already destroyed something I could never repair. I deserved this.
IT WASN’T LONG before my role in the turquoise house was revealed to me: babysitter, pot scrubber, laundry maid, beautician. This last I dreaded the most. Marvel would sit in the bathroom like a toad under a rock, calling for me just the way Justin called for her, relentlessly. I tried to escape by thinking of gamelan orchestras, creatures in tide pools, even the shape of the curtains, navy and green, noticing how the stripes created the curtain by the way they flowed or broke. I thought there was a meaning there, but she kept calling.
She knelt on the rug and stuck her head under the faucet and I washed her hair, stiff with dirt and hair spray. Her roots needed touching up. She went for a blond shade that on the package looked like soft butter gold, but on her more closely resembled the yellow shredded cellophane lining kids’ Easter baskets.
Marvel talked continuously, about her friends, her Mary Kay customers, something a woman saw on Oprah — not that Marvel watched Oprah, only Sally Jessy because Oprah was a fat nignog and not good enough to scrub Marvel’s floor, though she made ten million a season, blah blah blah. I pretended she was speaking Hungarian and that I couldn’t understand a word as I put on the gloves and mixed the contents of the two bottles. The smell of ammonia was overwhelming in the small windowless bathroom, but Marvel wouldn’t let me open the door. She didn’t want Ed to know she dyed her hair.
If I left the mixture too long, it would eat huge bloody sores into her scalp and all her hair would fall out. I thought that might be interesting, but I knew there were places worse than the Turlocks’. At least Marvel didn’t drink, and Ed was unattractive and barely noticed me. There wasn’t much damage I could do here.
Dear Astrid,
Don’t tell me how you hate your new foster home. If they’re not beating you, consider yourself lucky. Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.
Moo.
IT HADN’T OCCURRED to me the worst was yet to come, until my prescription ran out. I had foolishly doubled my dose, and now I lay shipwrecked on a desolate shore littered with broken glass. I caught a cold from the air-conditioning, which worked too well in my small porch room.
All I could think of was how alone I was. My loneliness tasted like pennies.
I thought about dying. A boy in the hospital had told me the best way was an air bubble in the bloodstream. He had bone cancer and had stolen a syringe he kept in an Archie comic book. He said if it ever got too bad, he’d shoot up some air, and it’d be over in seconds. If it weren’t for my mother’s letters, I would have thought of something. I reread them until they were soft and divided along the creases.
I once sent my mother a painting of the house set in its sea of blacktop and white gravel edges, and she sent me a poem about the infant Achilles, whose mother dipped him in black water to make him immortal. It didn’t make me feel any better.
I sat on the redwood picnic table and listened to music coming through the closed shutters of the house next door. They were always closed, but a jazz saxophone worked its way out from between the wood slats, music personal as a touch. I ran my fingertips over the dark carbon blade of my mother’s old knife, imagining opening my wrists. If you did it in the bathtub, they said, you didn’t even feel it. I wouldn’t have hesitated, except for my mother. But the scales were in precarious balance, everything on one side but my mother’s letters, light as good night, a hand touching my hair.
Dear Astrid,
I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Just make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. lattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.
Mother.
WITHOUT PERCODAN, I began to see why mothers abandoned their children, left them in supermarkets and at playgrounds. I had never imagined the whining, the constancy of those tiny demands, the endless watch.
I read everything — Colette, Françoise Sagan, Anaïs Nin’s Spy in the House of Love, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I read The Moon and Sixpence, about Gauguin, and the Chekhov short stories Michael had recommended. They didn’t have Miller but there was Kerouac. I read Lolita, but the man was nothing like Ray.
One day a title jumped out at me from a shelf of adventure books. I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages, ignoring the dark glances of the girls in their white shirts and plaid jumpers, and fell into it as into a pool during a dry season.
The name of the book was The Art of Survival.
Every religion needs its bible, and I had found mine, not a moment too soon. I read it in eighteen hours, and then started over again. I learned how to stay alive for long weeks on the open sea when my white ocean liner went down. When shipwrecked, you catch fish, press their juices to drink.
You sponge up morning dew off your life raft’s rubberized deck. Adrift on a sailboat, you catch rainwater on the canvas. But if the sails were dirty, the book pointed out, the decks crusted with salt, what water you caught would be worthless. You had to keep the decks clean, the sails rinsed, you had to be ready.
I looked at my life and saw quite clearly that I was not surviving it in the turquoise house. I was letting my sails crust up with salt. I had to stop playing johnny johnny and concentrate on preparing for rain, preparing for rescue. I decided I would take daily walks, stop overdoing the limp, retire my cane. I would pull myself together.
Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn’t see possibilities. Then came despair. A man from Japan was adrift four days in a boat when he panicked and hung himself. He was found twenty minutes later. A sailor from Soochow floated 116 days on a life raft before he was found. You never knew when rescue might come.
When I couldn’t sleep, I’d sit on the picnic table in the backyard, listening to the music from our next-door neighbor’s house and imagine my mother, awake in her cell just like me. Would I want her around if I’d crashed my plane in Papua New Guinea or Pará, Brazil? We’d slog through a hundred-mile labyrinth of mangrove forest, covered with leeches like in The African Queen, maybe even pierced with a long native spear. My mother wouldn’t panic, rip out the spear, and die of blood loss. I knew she could do the right thing, let the maggots feed in the wound, clearing out the hole, and then in five days or a week, pull out the spear. She would even write a poem about it.
But I could also see her making a terrible mistake, a failure in judgment.
I imagined us adrift in a life raft ten days outside shipping lanes, pressing fish juice, sponging each drop of water from the clean morning deck, when suddenly she determined seawater wasn’t undrinkable after all. I saw her going swimming among sharks.
“ASTRID, come help me,” Marvel called. She came out from the kitchen to where I sat on the back steps watching the kids, and twisted her neck around to see the picture, five blackened Frenchmen who tried to cross the Qaza basin in Egypt by day. “Still reading that book? You ought to think about the army, you like that kind of stuff. They take care of their people fine. Now they let women in, you’d probably get along. You work hard, you keep your mouth shut. Come on, help me with the groceries.”
My mother hated the country, couldn’t wait to get out. When I had her, the city was fine, it was free Thursday afternoons at the museum downtown, concerts on Sundays, poetry readings, her friends acting or painting or casting their private parts in plaster of paris. But now, what was the point. I hadn’t been to a museum since her arrest. Just that morning I saw a piece in the paper about a Georgia O’Keeffe show at the L.A. County Art Museum, asked Marvel if she’d take me.
“Well, pardon me, Princess Grace,” Marvel said. “What’s next, the opera? Change Caitlin’s diaper, will you, I got to take a leak.”
I called the bus company, they said it would take me three hours there, three hours back. It dawned on me how far I was from where I’d begun.
When you broke down in the desert, you had to work fast. In the Mojave, it could be 140 degrees in the shade. In an hour, you might sweat two and a half pints. People went crazy from thirst. You danced and sang and finally embraced a saguaro, thinking it was quite something else. A lover, a mother, a Christ. Then you ran away bleeding to die. To survive in the desert, you had to drink a quart of water a day. There was no sense in rationing — all those movies were lies. To drink less was just to commit slow suicide.
You put out your hubcaps to catch morning dew, drank radiator water, and buried yourself to the neck in the sand. Then you set off at nightfall, retracing your steps. Overhead, the sky would be full of stars. You needed a flashlight, a compass, you had to have watched how you came.
Davey had known all of these things. I suddenly knew he would also survive.
I looked up in time to see her, a striking black woman in a white linen suit. I’d only seen her a couple of times, picking up her magazines, leaving her house in the evening in silk and pearls. She never spoke to us or anyone in the neighborhood.
Marvel heard the car too, and stopped making a bottle for Caitlin to stare out over my shoulder and glare. “That damn whore. Thinks she’s the Duchess of Windsor. Makes me want to puke.”
“Traipsing around in that car,” Marvel grumbled. “Flaunting it in decent people’s faces. Like we didn’t know how she got it. Flat on her back is how.”
The car gleamed like the flanks of a man, soft and muscular, supple. I wanted to lie down on the hood, I thought I could probably come just lying on it.
Music seeped out, a singer, at first I thought she was drunk but then knew it wasn’t that at all, she had her own way with the words, played with them in her mouth like cherry chocolates.
I don’t know how long I stood in the dark, swaying to this music, the woman with a voice like a horn. It seemed impossible that a woman so elegant could live right next door to us with our fifty-inch TV. I wanted to crawl under her windows, peep through a crack in her fat-slatted shutters, and see what she was doing in there. But I didn’t have the nerve. I picked up a handful of her jacaranda blooms from the ground and pressed them to my face.
In the shade in front of the house next door, our elegant neighbor was cutting some lily of the Nile, the same color as the jacaranda bloom. She was barefoot in a simple dress, and her feet and the palms of her hands showed pale pink against her burnt caramel skin. They looked ornamental, as if she came from a place where women dipped hands and feet in pink powder.
I wished she would see me, so I could tell her, I’m not like them. Talk to me. Look up, I thought.
But she didn’t, only stopped and picked a sprig of alyssum to smell the honey. I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her.
“I like your yard,” I called out.
She looked up, startled, as if she knew I was there but didn’t think I’d speak to her. Her eyes were large and almond-shaped, the color of root beer.
She wore a thin scar on her left cheek, and a gold watch on her narrow wrist. She pushed a strand of marcel-waved hair from her face and threw me a quick smile, which faded just as quickly. She turned back to her lilies.
“You better not be seen talking to me. She’s going to burn a cross on my lawn.”
“You don’t have a lawn,” I said.
She smiled, but she didn’t look at me again.
“My name’s Astrid,” I said
“You go inside now,” she said. “Astrid.”
11.
HER NAME WAS Olivia Johnstone. That was the name on the magazines and catalogs on her doormat. She took Condé Nast Travelerand French Vogue, thick as a phone book. I babysat the kids in the front yard now, not to miss the least glimpse of her leaving the house in her Jackie O sunglasses, returning from shopping, clipping her herbs. Hoping our eyes would meet again. Packages came for her almost daily, the handsome UPS man lingering in her doorway. I wondered if he was in love with her, his legs like tree trunks in his UPS brown shorts.
I lived for the sight of her, taking out her trash or alighting from her car in the dim light of dawn while I was making my breakfast. It was just enough dew on my decks to keep me another day.
I picked sprigs of her rosemary and tucked them in my pockets. I went through her garbage when I knew she was out, thirsty to know more, to touch the things she touched. I found a wide-toothed tortoiseshell comb from Kent of London, good as new except for a single broken tooth, and a soap box, Crabtree and Evelyn’s Elderflower. She drank Myers’s rum, used extra virgin olive oil in a tall bottle. One of her boyfriends smoked cigars. I found an impossibly soft stocking, the garter kind, cloud taupe, laddered, and an empty flagon of Ma Griffe perfume, its label decorated with a scribble of black lines on white. It smelled of whispery black organdy dresses, of spotted green orchids and the Bois de Boulogne after rain, where my mother and I once walked for hours. I thrilled to share Paris with Olivia Johnstone. I saved the bottle in my drawer to scent my clothes.
THEN ONE DAY Olivia’s newspapers and magazines lay on her doorstep, untouched. The Corvette sat sullen under a tan canvas cover dotted with fallen jacaranda flowers like mementos of loss. Just the sight of the landlocked Corvette made me wish I had some Percodan left. I settled for some leftover codeine cough syrup Marvel had in her medicine chest. The sticky cloying taste lingered as I sat on my ripcord bedspread and combed my hair with Olivia’s comb. I was in awe of her perfection. A woman who would throw out a handmade tortoiseshell comb just because it was missing a tooth. I wondered if she really made love to men for money, what that was like. Prostitute. Whore. What did they really mean anyway? Only words.
My mother would hate that, but it was true. Words trailing their streamers of judgment.
What difference did it make if she was a whore. It sounded like ventriloquism to even say it. I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots — prostitute, housewife, saint — like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water. I ran her stocking up my leg, smelled the Ma Griffe.
I imagined she’d gone to Paris, that she was sitting at a café, having a cloudy Pernod and water, scarf tied to her purse like the women in her French Vogue.
The door opened. Olivia Johnstone was wearing a long print halter dress, her hair in a low chignon, her bare cinnamon shoulders smooth as bedposts.
I held the box out to her. “The UPS man left this.” One tooth on the comb, one tooth. She was perfect.
Then she said the words I’d been dreaming of, hoping for. “Would you
like to come in? I was just pouring some tea.”
She smiled. She had a slight overbite. I could understand how a man would want to kiss her.
We sat on the velvet couch and drank iced tea sweetened with honey and mint. Now that I was here, I was at a loss to begin. I’d had so many questions, but I couldn’t think of one. The decor bowled me over.
Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I’d never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I could feel my mother’s contemptuous gaze falling on the cluttered surfaces, but I was tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that.
She sat closer to me this time, arm across the back of the couch. I liked it though it made me nervous. She seemed to know exactly the effect she had on me. I couldn’t stop staring at her skin, which gleamed as if polished, exactly the color of the wallpaper, and I could smell Ma Griffe.
“Where did you go?” I asked.
“Back east. New York, Washington,” she said. “A friend had business there.”
“The BMW?”
She smiled, her overbite winking at me. She had an impish quality up close, not so perfect, but better. “No, not the BMW. He’s very married. You don’t see this man here.”
I’d been afraid she would talk about breadwarmers, but here she was, telling me about the men, as if it was the weather. Encouraged, I pressed for more. “Don’t you worry they’re going to run into each other?” She pursed her lips, raised her eyebrows. “I do try to avoid it.” Maybe it was true. Maybe she was. But if she was, it was nothing like the girls on Van Nuys Boulevard in their hot pants and satin baseball jackets. Olivia was linen and champagne and terra-cotta, botanical prints and “Seven Steps to Heaven.”
“Do you like one of them best?” I asked.
She stirred her iced tea with a long-handled spoon, letting Miles Davis seep into our pores. “No. Not really. How about you, do you have a boyfriend, someone special?”
I was going to tell her that I did, an older man, make it sound glamorous, but I ended up telling her my sorry life history, Starr and Ray, my mother, Marvel Turlock. She was easy to talk to, sympathetic. She asked questions, listened, and kept the music coming, tea and lemon cookies. I felt I had woken up on my raft to find a yacht dropping a ladder.
You never knew when rescue might come.
“It won’t always be so hard, Astrid,” she told me, brushing a lock of my hair behind my ear. “Beautiful girls have certain advantages.”
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to know those things she knew, so I wouldn’t be afraid anymore, so I’d believe there was an end to it all. “Like what?”
“It’s a man’s world, Astrid,” she said. “You ever hear that?” I nodded. A man’s world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you could get raped or beat up. A man’s world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money, and didn’t have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not.
But I didn’t know much more about a man’s world. That place where men wore suits and watches and cuff links and went into office buildings, ate in restaurants, drove down the street talking on cell phones. I’d seen them, but their lives were as incomprehensible as the lives of Tibetan Sherpas or Amazonian chiefs.
Olivia took my hand and turned it over, brushed the tips of her dry fingers down my moist palm, sending waves of electricity up my arms.
“Who has the money?” she asked, softly. “Who has the power? You have a good mind, you’re artistic, you’re very sensitive, see?” She showed me lines in my hand, her fingertips like a grainy fabric stroking my skin.
“Don’t fight the world. Your carpenter friend, he didn’t fight the wood, did he? He made love to it, and what he made was beautiful.”
ne, are made love to it, and what he made was beautiful.”
I thought about that. My mother fought the wood, hacking at it, trying to slam it into place with a hammer. She considered it the essence of cowardice not to. “What else do you see?” I asked.
Olivia curled my fingers up, wrapping my fate, handing it back to me.
I picked at a burn blister on my middle finger and thought about fighting the grain or not. Women like my mother, alone as tigers, fighting every step. Women with men, like Marvel and Starr, trying to please.
Neither one seemed to have the advantage. But Olivia didn’t mean men like Ed Turlock or even Ray. She meant men with money. That man’s world.
The cuff links and offices.
“You’ll figure out what men want and how to give it to them. And how not to.” She smiled her naughty crooked grin. “And when to do which.” The little brass clock whirred and struck five, a music box tune, tiny chimes. So many pretty things, but it was getting late, I didn’t want to go, I wanted to find out more, I wanted Olivia to handle my future like wax, softening it in the heat of her parched hands, shaping it into something I didn’t have to dread. “You mean sex.”
“Not necessarily.” She glanced at the round mirror over the fireplace, at the drop-top desk with its secret drawers and pigeonholes. “It’s magic, Astrid. You have to know how to reach up and pull beauty out of thin air.” She pretended to reach up and grab a firefly, then opened her palms slowly and watched it fly out. “People want a little magic. Sex is its theater. There are sliding panels and trapdoors.”
The night magic. Never let a man stay the night. But my mother’s theater was her own pleasure. This was something quite different. I was excited that I knew this.
“The secret is — a magician doesn’t buy magic. Admire the skill of a fellow magician, but never fall under his spell.” She rose and collected our glasses. And I thought of how Barry seduced my mother, his smoked mirrors and hidden trained doves. She never chose him, not really, but she gave him everything. She would always be his, even if he was dead. He had shaped her destiny.
“So what about love?” I asked.
She had started toward the kitchen but stopped, turned back, glasses in her hands. “What about it?” When Olivia frowned, two vertical lines sliced between her eyebrows and cut into her rounded forehead.
I flushed red, but I wanted to know. If only I could ask without falling all over myself like a clown in size fourteen shoes. “Don’t you believe in it?”
“I don’t believe in it the way people believe in God or the tooth fairy.
It’s more like the National Enquirer. A big headline and a very dull story.” I followed her into the kitchen, exactly like ours yet light-years away, a parallel universe. Her pots and pans dangled overhead from a restaurant rack — copper pots, iron. Ours were Corning Ware with the little blue flowers. I ran my hands over Olivia’s terra-cotta counters. inset with painted ceramics, where ours were mottled green and white, like a bad cold.
“So what do you believe in?” I asked her.
Her dark gaze ran with pleasure along the warm cinnamon tile, the beaten copper hood over the range. “I believe in living as I like. I see a Stickley lamp, a cashmere sweater, and I know I can have it. I own two houses besides this. When the ashtrays are full in my car, I’ll sell it.”
I laughed, imagining her bringing it back to the dealer, explaining why she was selling. She probably would. I could hardly fathom someone living so close to her own desire.
“I just spent three weeks in Tuscany. I saw the Palio in Siena,” she said, strumming the words like the strings of a guitar. “It’s a fifteenth-century horse race through the cobbled streets. Would I exchange that for a husband and kids and happily-ever-after? Not to mention the likely outcome, divorce and overtime at the bank and shaky child support. Let me show you something.”
She picked up the small quilted bag on her counter, found her wallet, opened it for me to see the wad of cash as thick as my finger. She spread the bills, at least a dozen hundreds among the others. “Love’s an illusion. It’s a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt.
I’d rather have cash.” She put her money away, zipped her purse.
Then she put her arm around my shoulder and led me to the door. The amber light fell through the bubble glass against our cheeks. She hugged me lightly. I smelled Ma Griffe, it was warmer on her. “Come again, anytime. I don’t know many women. I’d like to know you.”
I left walking backwards so I wouldn’t miss a moment of her. I hated the idea of going back to Marvel’s, so I walked around the block, feeling Olivia’s arms around me, my nose full of perfume and the smell of her skin, my head swirling with what I had seen and heard in the house so much like ours, and yet not at all. And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality.
In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.
hexafu 