PETALUMA, CALIFORNIA, 1960
Getting in touch with her parents had not proved as easy as either she or Charlie suspected, and the change in them, their sudden remoteness in the world, was something she almost admired her first weeks in their new home.
Their phone number, the same for thirty years, had been disconnected, and the letter she sent, forwarded to the Petaluma address, took weeks to reach them. Ashamed of their daughters, tired of the country club gossip, Fay’s mother and father had purchased a rambling farmhouse in the northern part of the state. They had driven the nine hours along the coast, silent on a twisting road.
FAY HAD READ THE REPLY aloud to Charlie on the porch, their feet propped and a little crowded on the same milk crate, passing a bottle of beer back and forth.
Dear Fay,
We have moved away and are now just north of San Francisco. A bus leaves twice a day from the city to Petaluma. Enclosed are a map and a schedule. Send us a telegram when you are sure of your arrival. If at all possible, please dress for the trip.
C & J
The sisters had cackled at it, clutching at each other’s elbows.
“If at all possible, please don’t arrive in the nude.”
“If clothing is worn, please remove all rodents that may be clinging to your attire or dependent on you for food.”
“If at all possible, stow away inside a tasteful trunk. Using your forehead like a battering ram, heave your way onto the platform without breathing audibly or alarming any of your fellow passengers. Make it appear the trunk has been delicately placed there by a respectable steward of the railroad.”
She had still been under the impression that the trip would prove merely an interruption of the life she’d been living, a belief whose bottom fell out the first time they took her to dinner. Her mother knocked on her door before with the dress Fay was to wear, something with an empire waist that would hide the fact of her bump.
A week before she left, disturbed by the Santa Ana winds, Lloyd had gone missing, four days in which all of Charlie’s syllables elided and she drank only one jam jar of water. “What in shitfire you think goes into beer!” she yelled when Fay asked. When he returned, striding into the bar with a pejorative sigh, Charlie spent fifteen minutes with her head pressed to his. Fay’s going-away party, two nights later, had been informal, unnamed, a secret between the sisters that the men didn’t suspect. That night Fay was quick on her feet again, taking orders from across the room by gesture and wink, a pointer raised for a martini up, two fingers pinched on her nostrils to indicate dirty. Her sister was on the guitar, playing Hank Williams—Her personality made me want her. That she and Charlie both mounted Lloyd, Fay’s chin tucked onto Charlie’s collarbone, and disappeared for twenty minutes, seemed a return to business as usual. The men smoking by the pool had seen them way out, their bodies one slumped shape, a two-headed thing that could not carry itself.
KINDNESSES IN HER PARENTS’ HOME were indirect, a stray sweater folded neatly where it was left, a fire lit in anticipation of another’s return. Fay, the growing hump in her stomach set low and unyielding, helped with the patch of edibles her mother had planted in a hurry to remake her life. She watered the rows of arugula and corn and spoke idly to the chickens as she gathered their eggs, marbled brown and coral pink. Her father drove her to doctor’s appointments, more careful with left turns than she remembered, and when she came home there was lunch waiting, covered by a butler’s tray. Alone, she ate the tomatoes peeled and cut back to resemble flowers, the ham and apple muffins. The house sat high on a hill and the bay windows were poorly insulated, a breach of the outside world on the domestic that her parents would never have accepted before. As Fay sat at the table situated between them she could feel the winds she imagined were headed for the town, a place she watched every day but had rarely visited. Something had changed about her mind. When it came to a problem it couldn’t solve, it would point, somewhat lazily, to dying. Or you could kill yourself, it thought for her, your mother’s Seconal, your father’s Smith & Wesson. She was disturbed but learned to think around this, a rude guest at dinner whose comments you ignored.
As she became bigger she was less content to remain on the property, and she felt keenly that this anxiety belonged to her child, that he wanted to see and know and had soaked up all there was in that silent home, on that golden hill. Her father caught her hiking the three miles to the small downtown—a hardware store with a taxidermied brown bear in the window, a movie theater with a marquee that wrapped around the corner, a mostly stagnant estuary—and insisted on driving her. He pulled into a parking space and opened his newspaper, told her to take as long as she needed, but what she needed was for no one to know where she was, so she only skulked a few blocks up to the grocery, where she bought nothing, then returned to the car.