“Oh no.” Neal stood in his wrinkled shirt cradling a jar of beet juice against his heart as he stared at the tumble of tapes and books spilled onto the floor of the Lincoln. “A thief broke into your car.”
“Not exactly.”
“You got rear-ended?”
“I did it myself. I had a tantrum.” Kay opened the back door of the car for Nicky, watched while he fastened his seat belt, and then carefully set the peach pie down on his lap. “Sure you want to hold this?” she asked. “Yes,” he whispered back. She closed his door and straightened. The smoky autumn night had an edge of cold to the air. Neal stood backlit by the pistachio tree that still held sunset color in its leaves. His face sagged, tragic, rumpled with grief. She felt a throb of alarm. Something was wrong with Neal, something she ought to know about and fix. Sighing, he bent and began to pick Chopin tapes off the floor of her car. She wondered if he’d ask why she’d had a tantrum, if he’d show any curiosity at all, but all he said was “Oh babe,” in that same tearful voice, as if he knew far too much already.
She opened the passenger door, cleared a space, and eased the pot of boeuf bourguignon onto the floor so she could clamp it steady between her feet as Neal drove. The mandarin collar of the brown brocade dress her parents had brought her from Hong Kong bit at her neck as she pulled on the seat belt. “At least when I lose my temper I don’t hold it in,” she said. “I act out.” As if that were anything to be proud of. As if that were even true. She turned and stared out the window.
“I just wish you were happier,” Neal said, and then, to Nicky, in the same funereal voice, “All right, son? Ready to face your mother’s family?”
“It’s his family too,” Kay said.
Neal said nothing. Kay watched the junky, comfortable, tree-shaded clutter of their neighborhood empty into the half-deserted downtown of West Valley, then thin and disappear into the freeway. She wished she could show Nicky what this county had looked like when she was a girl. She could still see the fields of live oaks and lupine where the strip malls were now. She could remember how she and Victor had tobogganed on flattened cardboard boxes down grassy hills now terraced with condominiums. The orchards had been torn down for tract homes; the duck pond had been filled in with concrete and turned into a strange buzzing enclave of radio transmitters, the meadows had been bulldozed for uneasy-looking hotels and office buildings. The new cinema complex floated in glassy splendor on what once had been—and surely would be again—marshland, and Manzanita Heights, which Francis had designed and developed on the east side of the mountain, rose confidently over a lava bed. There were still a few reminders of the old county: the library where she worked still nestled beneath an ancient acacia tree; Le Petit Jardin still sent rich winey smells to the streets of Rancho Valdez over its gated brick walls; the community college where Ida took class after class was still an oasis of white paths winding through clipped green lawns.
Neal’s hand reached for hers across the front seat and she pressed it, grateful, but then his finger probed the place she had burned on her thumb while browning those little pearl onions Victor liked so much and she winced as he rubbed it back and forth. Neal doesn’t know, she reminded herself. It’s just a gift he has. “Honey,” she said, “that hurts.” Neal withdrew, his profile no more stricken than it had been all day. Some people have a secret life, she thought. Neal has a secret death. “Do you think my father has a mistress?” she asked.
“Your mother’s his mistress,” Neal answered. “She runs him ragged.”
“Um. So that’s what mistresses do. I always thought some black lace was involved.” She waited a minute, then, “Zabeth would make a good mistress, wouldn’t she? Don’t you think Zabeth’s attractive?”
“Who’s Zabeth?”
“Help.”
Neal was silent for a while then, “You’ll be good?” He frowned as the old car coughed in its climb to the Heights. “None of your tricks?”
“What tricks?”
“Smoking,” Nicky said from the back seat.
“You don’t smoke anymore, do you?” Neal glanced at her, astonished.
Kay thought of the battered Merit she was about to slip back unsmoked into Ida’s purse and said, “No.” She reached back through a crack in the seat and grabbed for Nicky’s knee; he giggled and hollered, “Yes she does.”
Neal, intent on driving, ignored them. “I was thinking more of the way you upset her,” he said after a while.
“I? Upset her?”
“Just watch what you say. Every time we leave, Ida’s in tears.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“Grandmère cries over everything,” Nicky agreed. “Once she even cried when my Go-Bot got broken.”
Kay remembered the Go-Bot, Nicky’s favorite plastic superhero toy, the way its jointed leg had snapped off at the knee when Victor got excited at dinner one night and bent it too far back. “That was because Grandmère’s left leg had just been amputated the first time,” she reminded him, turning to talk over her shoulder. “And try not to stare tonight, Nick. Her other leg is gone now too.”
Nicky nodded gravely as he balanced the pie. “I know,” he said.
“She’s in a lot of pain and she’s very sad.”
“I know.”
“Do you really think I make Mom cry on purpose?” Kay turned back to Neal and waited, convinced as always that at some level Neal knew more than she, saw things more clearly. But Neal said nothing more. He turned the car through the brick gates with the wrought iron arch that Francis had designed in twenty seconds—or so he said—and passed the big houses with their big garages, came to her parents’ driveway at the top, and parked. All the lights were blazing and from somewhere inside they could hear Coco’s sharp bark. God, I don’t want to be here, Kay thought, and she stood in the twilight, clutching her pot of hot food, swaying on her high heels, breathing in the familiar smells of chrysanthemum and cypress from the garden, chlorine from the swimming pool, creosote from the redwood deck, dog poop from the long slate walkway. Nicky walked close to her side, holding the pie, eyes on the swimming pool—he had not gone in the pool since last summer when they had both seen a rattlesnake swim across it, undulating slowly, its wedged head alert, held high, not unlike the way Ida swam, Kay had thought, the same regal sweep. Neal followed with the rest of the groceries as Kay led the way to the door. All three stood, taking a communal deep breath; then Kay raised the heavy brass temple gong and rapped as jazzily as its weight would permit.
“Now who’s come to bother us?” Francis caroled through the door, and Ida cried behind him, “For God’s sake Francis, get the dog!” Then the door opened and there was Francis himself, in corduroy pants and a striped shirt, peering at them over the tops of his glasses. He pointed his gold pen at Nicky. “Well now,” he said, “who invited you?”
Nicky glanced up at Kay, uncertain, and just at that second, Coco, a blur of blond fur and bulging black eyes, raced toward them and leapt. Ida screamed from the living room, Nicky closed his eyes and bravely raised the pie, and Kay collared the dog just as its nails ripped the length of one of her stockings. “Hi, Dad,” she said. “Hope you’re hungry.”
“Oh, I haven’t been hungry since 1934,” Francis said, taking Coco from her, “and then it was only because of the Depression. It passed. Most things do pass,” he said to Nicky, as Nicky opened his eyes again. “You’re not afraid of a little old poodle dog are you?”
“Coco’s not a dog,” Kay said. “She’s a fiend from hell.”
“I didn’t drop the pie, Mom,” Nicky said.
“I’m glad it passed, Francis,” Neal said behind them, his timing, as always, impeccable. “I brought you and Ida some fresh-squeezed beet juice and some of that Vitamin B complex I was telling you about to help it pass even smoother.”
“More smoothly,” Ida’s voice corrected from the living room.
“Your mother,” Francis said to Kay as he dragged Coco off to her cage in the kitchen, “has been waiting for you since four.”
Kay walked over the polished tile floor of the entry hall, Nicky holding the pie out before him. Their footsteps made hard, hollow sounds and the mirrored walls glittered with recessed lights. She could hear the low roar of the football game Francis had been watching in the television room and she could smell the meaty aroma of Coco’s dinner, simmering on the stove.
“You kept me waiting thirty-six hours before you were born,” Ida sang out, her voice already hoarse from the determination to be gay, tears already edging each word, “and you haven’t changed a bit.” She sat in her wheelchair, positioned in front of the empty black vault of the fireplace; she was flanked on either side by tall unlit candles set on the hearth. She suddenly smiled her beautiful lipsticky smile and lifted her hands, palms up. She was wearing a new dress of flowered pink silk and had a mink blanket over her lap. “Come give me a kiss.”
Kay bent down and kissed her mother’s cheek. She tasted rouge, powder, felt the rough brush of a diamond earring against her lips. Ida’s small head was hot, her hair damp at the roots—she must still be having that afternoon fever. She coughed, laughing, against Kay’s shoulder, and her cough smelled of whiskey, tobacco, perfume, that sweetish hospital medication, and something else, just a whiff of something grey and fetid. “We’re not that late,” Kay soothed. Ida clutched the blanket against her waist with one hand and reached for Nicky with the other.
“What a lovely pie you brought for my dinner,” Ida said to Nicky. “Did you bake it yourself?”
“No.”
“Did you at least pick the peaches yourself?”
“No.”
“Then what good are you?”
Nicky, confused, looked up at Kay. She steadied her fingers on his shoulder, thinking of the poster she had hung in his room. A CHILD DOESN’T HAVE TO BE SOMEBODY, the poster said. A CHILD IS SOMEBODY.
“He’s very good indeed,” Kay said.
“Oh I know that,” Ida said. “I’d hold you in my lap,” she added to Nicky, “if I had a lap. But it’s gone. The doctors took it away.”
Nicky’s eyes dropped frankly to the space beneath the blanket and Kay looked just as hard at the empty glass by Ida’s side. How long had she been drinking? She seemed to have passed the toujours gai part of the cocktail hour and slipped into the darker humor of her late night drunks. Why did Dad let her do it? The drinks he mixed her were enough to stun an ox. Didn’t he know better? Or did he do it on purpose? Ida lifted the empty glass as Neal approached and jiggled the ice at him.
“Why don’t we all hold off and wait until dinner,” Neal said. “I brought you some nice juice.”
“Neal. Take this goddamn glass and go in the kitchen and get me a goddamn drink. Thank you. Now. Nicky. Give me a hug. Come close. Closer. Don’t be scared. Ouch. Watch out. You stepped on my toe! Ouch ouch, you hurt Grandmère’s toe.”
“You don’t have a toe,” Nicky said.
“Yes I do! You just can’t see it! I have a phantom toe! And now, oh ouch, it’s having phantom pain.”
“So could we just feel phantom guilt about stepping on it?” Kay asked, guiding Nicky off toward the safety of the kitchen.
“Why should you feel anything about it? It’s my problem, isn’t it.” Ida sniffled loudly and covered her face with her hand. Maybe she’ll pass out, Kay prayed. “You’ve got to ignore Grandma when she gets like this,” she whispered.
“It’s Grandmère,” Ida called eerily behind her, “and all I ever am is ignored.”
The acoustics, Kay mouthed to Neal. The acoustics in this house are Satanic. She set Nicky up on the high kitchen counter to draw dinosaurs as she unpacked the salad makings and slipped the casserole into the oven to reheat.
“I’m waiting,” Ida called in an unsteady voice.
“Your drink is coming, Grandmère,” Neal muttered.
“I’m not your grandmère. I’m not that old.”
Nicky giggled and Kay had to grin too. She is awful, Kay thought. But, as Zabeth said, you had to admire her. Fresh out of the hospital and as impossible as ever. She waited until Neal left to take the heavily watered Scotch he had made to Ida, then she opened her purse, extracted the rumpled cigarette, and started to slip it into an open pack Francis had left on the counter. It didn’t want to go in. It bent and buckled. Oh just smoke it, Kay thought.
She picked up a kitchen match, murmured something about needing a clean dishtowel to Nicky, and stepped into the laundry room off the kitchen where she could hide. She struck the match against her shoe, leaned against the dryer, and inhaled deeply. The Merit didn’t draw well, but by the third drag the tobacco finally announced itself: stable hay, sharp as summer sex with a stranger. It made her feel nauseated and excited, evil and doomed. Her heart beat more quickly; her fingertips and toes went ice-cold, her throat burned. She felt scared as a teenager and when the side door banged open and Francis stepped in from the garage, she acted like a teenager, quickly turning to run the cigarette under the laundry sink tap.
“Gotcha.” Francis held a library book under his elbow—the Civil War romance Kay had brought Ida in the hospital. Had he been reading it out in the garage? She remembered last Fourth of July when she had seen him out there, tipped back in the bucket seat of his Porsche, sound asleep. “I thought you were going to set us a good example,” Francis said now, “and quit that vile habit.”
“I have quit,” Kay said. She managed a weak, stupid smile. “It’s just … sometimes.”
“Bad for you,” Francis said. “Very, very bad for you.” He reached into the cupboard over the dryer and brought down a new quart of Chivas Regal. “In case you ever want to know where the good stash is,” he said, “look up here. Del down at the booze boutique gives me a deal when I buy cases. Just don’t tell your mother. She’ll get Greta to bring her bottles in bed. Speaking of not-telling-your-mother”—he reached past Kay and turned the tap back on so the water sounded loudly in the sink—“there’s something else I don’t want her to know.”
Kay prepared for his confession. Zabeth, she thought. He knows I know he’s having lunch with Zabeth. And now he’s going to ask me not to mention it to Mom. She crossed her arms and set her jaw, waiting. But Francis raised clear, tired, innocent eyes. “Jim Deeds and his boys at the hospital found spots,” he said.
“Spots?” Kay stopped, confused.
“On Ida’s lungs. They think she may have TB.”
“On top of everything else? That’s awful. Can they treat it?”
“Oh sure. They can treat anything these days. Just not very well.”
Kay said the first thing that came into her head. “Poor Dad.”
“Not at all. I’m fine. No spots on me. Yet.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a cigarette. As he bent to his lighter Kay saw his growing baldness. His scalp beneath the strands of stiff grey hair was rosy and freckled and tender as trout skin. She wanted to reach out and touch it, comfort him, if she could, for growing old and having so many worries to deal with. But what could she do? She’d only make things worse. Her hand curled and dropped by her side as he looked up. “Your pushy friend Zabeth,” he said, “wants to meet me for a drug deal on Thursday but that’s the day I have to take Ida in for more X-rays. Think you could call her and cancel? Or I could get Sunny-at-the-Office to do it if you can’t.”
“Sure,” Kay said. She hid a smile of relief. If he won’t even call Zabeth himself, it must not be a “date.” It must be no more to worry about than the “spots.” Tuberculosis was curable these days after all; Ida would be fine. “Do you want me to reschedule?” she asked brightly. She felt like Francis’s loyal, hardworking secretary, Sunny-at-the-Office herself.
“Hey.” Francis turned the water off and cocked his head as Coco yipped from her cage. “I do believe the Lion is telling us that the Christians have arrived. Repent. While there’s still time.” He led the way out of the laundry room and Kay followed him into the kitchen. “Well now, looky,” he crowed. “Sister Stacy and Brother Vic.”
Stacy, her arms wrapped around Nicky at the kitchen counter, tipped her head and giggled, her tongue curling up. She was dressed, as Kay was, in some awful ethnic outfit Francis and Ida had brought back from their travels, but the Swiss dirndl skirt and peasant blouse suited her, emphasized her curves and softness. Kay tugged again at the mandarin collar and resolved to give the damn dress to charity tomorrow. Stacy beamed and swung Nicky back and forth. “What a cutie,” she said. “And getting sooo tall.” Nicky squirmed, thrilled, ducking away as Victor came up to give him a feint to the belly. Victor laughed, flushed and handsome, the one with the looks in the family, his gold hair and blue eyes from Ida, his small nose and long lashes from Francis. He and Kay exchanged cold grins, then he turned to Francis and shook his hand.
“How’s it going, Dad,” he said. “You holding up okay? Just saw Mom out there in the living room. She looks great as ever.”
“She keeps getting shorter,” Francis complained.
“Sure. But hey. What a constitution, you know? Just back from the hospital? Old Neal couldn’t take it. He’s white as a sheet. Watching the football game.”
“He is?” Kay reached for the wine and poured herself a glass.
“Yeah. Mom was telling him about the doctors and stuff and he just got up and went into the TV room. But Mom’s cool about it.”
“She’s super,” Stacy said.
“She is indeed,” Francis agreed. “Runs on blood, guts, and alcohol.”
“Unless Neal makes my drinks,” Ida called from the living room, “then I run on tap water. Someone bring me a real drink?” She shook the ice in her glass.
“Coming, dear,” Francis said, tiptoeing backward.
“Smells delish,” Stacy said, moving to make Ida’s drink for her.
“Not bad,” Victor agreed. “What kind of wine did you use with the beef?”
“Same kind I drink.”
“Yeah? Night Train?”
“Children,” Francis said. “Don’t forget: you’re not anymore.” He disappeared into the laundry room and Kay heard him open the back door and pad into the garage. He still had the book, she remembered. And the quart of Chivas. And—her eyes scanned the countertop—the pack of Merit 100s. He could sit in the Porsche and read and drink and smoke in peace until dinner. A real family man. Not as macho as Neal though. Actually getting up and walking away while Ida told him about her operation: that was extraordinary. That took passive-aggressive to a whole new level. “He doesn’t have enough fire for you,” Ida had said the first time she’d met Neal. And she was right. Charles Lichtman had fire. But Charles Lichtman would probably never speak to her again.
“Want to help?” she asked Victor. “You could set the table.”
“Better get Stacy to do that. I haven’t really had a chance to talk to Mom yet.”
“Amazing.” Kay watched him walk out of the kitchen carrying the fresh drink Stacy had measured and poured. “Does he help you out at home?”
Stacy giggled, her tongue pink through pink lips. “He’s sort of traditional,” she admitted. Then, “Look at you.”
Kay looked. Terrible dress, torn hose, terrible shoes. “What?”
“Cute.”
“Cute?”
“Really cute.”
“Thank you.” Kay wondered when, if ever, she and Stacy would have a real conversation. Perhaps it was impossible. Yet she knew there was more to Stacy than this weird little female impersonator she appeared to be: She had survived gonorrhea and a conversion to Christianity so total that she and Victor had torn up their marijuana plants by the root and written a joint letter of confession to the local papers, recanting their past lives as “helpless hopeless hippies.” She taught Sunday School, helped edit a right-to-life newsletter, and read the Bible to blind people once a week.
“Let’s get the table done together,” Kay suggested. “I’ll do the silver if you’ll get the napkins.”
They used crystal and linen and hand-painted china. Someone—Francis?—had set the banged-up bleeding heart in the center of the table. Kay lifted it off, set it outside on the deck to die, and replaced it with red leaves she quickly ripped off a Japanese maple in the dark by the swimming pool. All the Sunday dinners as far back as she could remember had been this formal, with candles and monogrammed napkin holders and the salt and pepper clogged inside the old silver shakers. She straightened a corner of the lace tablecloth, then hurried back into the kitchen to slice the French bread, make the salad dressing, unwrap the butter. Sometimes she felt as if she were on roller skates here, or in some old movie, jerkily zipping from chore to chore like a silent actor. She poured more wine into her glass, drained it quickly, and poured just a touch more. She started to slice tomatoes into the salad bowl but jumped when Francis came in from the garage. He pointed at the cut she had just given herself, right above the burn on her thumb.