CHAPTER 53

There was no point staying in Baltimore. Brenda and I were at a standoff. The executor told both of us his hands were tied. So I went back to California, presumably to look for work since I’d given up the copy editor job to take care of my father. When I got to LA, though, I found out that I didn’t know what sort of work I wanted to do anymore. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I kept seeing a garbage truck on a slow rumble down Cedar Drive, Brenda waiting at the curb with an armload of cap guns and Shirley Temple dolls. I was stuck. I couldn’t move forward, it seemed, until I got the chance to sort through the past. I tried to think of a way out of my predicament—or really, a way inside was what I needed—but I came up with nothing. Instead I started drinking wine out of a beer mug. I paced the patio in frustration wishing I smoked. Then one day while watering the lemon tree, I had a brilliant idea. “Fred!” I called into the den. He was watching a Yankees game. “I’ll write her a check,” I said.

He put the TV on mute. “You’re going to give Brenda the money?”

“I’ll go see her and give her the whole $20,000. I’ll just hand it over, and she’ll hand over my stuff and I’ll drive away with everything in the car, straight to the bank, where I’ll stop payment on the check.”

Fred laughed. “You’re a genius, Jo. Ever heard of check fraud? Ask your uncles. I’m sure Harry and Alvin can show you how to kite a check.”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said. “But this is the first time I ever realized how handy a thing like that could be.”

I crossed fraud off my list, and since I still wasn’t giving in to Brenda’s blackmail, there was nothing left except to find a good lawyer of my own. I called Anne Brighton, someone I knew from college who practiced law in Maryland. The most obvious action, Anne Brighton said, was to make a claim against the estate, but since my father’s will clearly stated Brenda got the house and “all its contents” that path wasn’t viable for me. Instead, I could file a replevin suit, which was an action that claimed the right to have personal property returned from the possession of someone with less right to hold it than the plaintiff. It was an old term dating back to the thirteenth century. I liked the sound of it. I’d have the chance to stand up for myself in court. But again, Anne said those suits were hard to win.

“So possession really is nine-tenths of the law? It isn’t just a schoolyard taunt?” I said.

“Correct,” said Anne. “But even more dicey is the fact that filing a replevin suit is a tip-off. Right now, your stepmother is hanging onto the stuff to use as a bargaining chip. She wants the money, right? As soon as she hears about a viable lawsuit, though, and the possibility of a judge ordering her to hand over certain items with no compensation, there’s nothing to keep her from throwing away the things you want.”

Brenda would do it, too. The replevin suit could mean losing everything and cutting off all other avenues of recourse. A replevin suit had to be a last resort. I asked Anne if there were other options to try first. She said it depended on what I wanted. “What’s your goal?” she asked.

My goal. What did I want? The manuscript, most of all. Ye Olde Picture Booke. His letters, his poetry, my drawings, the rose quartz giraffe from Aunt Adele. And something harder to name—the things I didn’t know existed, the things I wasn’t even looking for. I wouldn’t have said this to literal-minded Anne Brighton, but my goal, when I really thought about it, was to steal back my childhood, so I could have it and then be able to move on. “I have to get into the house,” I said.

“OK then. Here’s an option where you wouldn’t risk losing property,” Anne said, “because unlike the replevin suit, this remedy doesn’t announce itself. It involves a different kind of risk, though. Rather than risking your belongings, you’d be putting yourself in jeopardy.”

I was on the portable phone looking out the window at the solitary mop top of a palm tree way up in the blue, blue Venice sky, listing in the breeze. I’d made a surprising discovery when my father was sick. I’d always thought of myself as fearful, end of story. But I learned I could be brave. A skateboard clacked over the sidewalk joints somewhere down the street. “That’s all right, Anne,” I said. “I’ll put myself in jeopardy. Just tell me what the remedy is.”

“I’m talking about self-help,” Anne said. “You help yourself to what you want.”

“I get it,” I said. “I break in.” The palm tree swayed, and the skater came into view, his wheels clicking and grinding. It was the kid next door. He balanced his weight on one end of the board and the other end flipped up.

“Break in?” Anne said, all innocence. “Well, no. I wouldn’t tell you to break the law. But maybe you know of a time when the maid, I mean, the house cleaner is there?”

“I don’t think Brenda has a house cleaner.”

“Well then, someone who comes over regularly, who could let you in?”

“I don’t know of anyone who comes over regularly. Not anymore.”

“There must be someone. Think about it.”

I hung up and went to tell Fred.

“Who is she, this Anne Brighton?” he said.

“Friend from college.”

“And this friend from college who you’ve never even mentioned before, she’s suggesting you do what?”

“I steal.”

For the next several days, I spitballed ways of getting into the house—I’d disguise myself as a Mary Kay lady or a dogwalker or the Fuller Brush man. I tried to think of somebody, anybody, who might visit Brenda and allow me to tag along. Then my mother remembered Darleen’s husband Travis did yard work for Brenda. He trimmed the hedges, my mother said, and also did some handyman stuff and so he had access to the inside of the house. “The handyman stuff Daddy used to do,” my mother said. We were both quiet for a moment thinking of him.

Travis seemed like a great idea until I considered exactly what I’d be asking. He had an arrangement with Brenda based on trust. I thought it over. I had no problem betraying Brenda. I could even betray my dead father and break the promise I made to him. But I didn’t feel right asking Travis to betray Brenda. Shedding my good girl role was a tricky process. There ought to have been a simple con I could live with, but I was stuck. I couldn’t come up with a seamless way of getting past Brenda. I kept remembering how she threw herself between me and the door, how undeterred she seemed at the prospect of violence. I was seething over the injustice of it all, my belongings held hostage after everything I’d done for my father. I couldn’t let Brenda throw away the manuscript! It was the story of his childhood. I never wanted anything so badly, and yet at every turn I hit a brick wall.

What was my goal? Anne Brighton asked. How much easier that question had to be for her—at the top of her class in law school, hired by a big DC firm, handed a fat paycheck and respect along with it. I bet Anne was motivated in school by something other than sex. From Johnny onward, I cared about nothing else. In high school, college, and later in New York, sex was all I was interested in. I had no ambition because anything I was good at (cartoons and amusing stories) had no value. There were so many guys, I lost count, the only goal to conquer this one or that. I got tired of it, eventually. I got so tired I wanted to go home, but I had no home to go to. My mother’s apartment with Marty wandering around in his shorty bathrobe was not home. Cedar Drive with Darleen, and later Brenda, was not home. Then I met Fred, and Fred was home.

What was my goal? Did I have to grow up and move away from home, away from Fred, in order to fulfill my promise? In order to conquer my fears? Fred was so gentle and soft-spoken, I didn’t realize how he subverted what little ambition I had. I should have taken the GQ assignment, obviously. How many other opportunities had I missed, trusting Fred’s advice over the years? I’d have to figure out my next step. Could I stay with him and still change my life? I’d have to consult with the bold seven-year-old who crossed the tarmac at Friendship Airport with clear eyes, ready to take her place in the world of boys and men, of composers and chess players, of doers, actors, creators. Too bad that seven-year-old girl grew up only to let others steal the spotlight. No more, I thought. I refused to be held back any longer by anyone else’s agenda or limitations.

The wind picked up and the skinny palm tree seemed like it might snap in half. Instead, it bowed in a graceful arc, remarkably resilient. I was a throwaway person, my father said. I shrugged off my own importance. A throwaway person who was nevertheless intent on Brenda not throwing anything away.

One day, the brick wall I kept ramming my head against started to buckle. It turned out all I had needed was a deadline. It came in the form of a letter from from the executor warning about the six-month statute of limitations for claims made against the estate of Clyde Aronson. Time was running out. “Please understand that I do not wish to encourage litigation,” the executor wrote. “But I wanted you to be aware of this issue of limitations.” If I wanted to take legal action against the estate, I should know that August 16, 1987, was the last date I could file. If I tried self-help and failed, I wanted the option of filing a replevin suit. Which meant I had to try and help myself before August 16th. No more Hamlet-like paralysis. I was going to act without worrying about any promises except those I made to myself. I never got the chance to lock Brenda out of the house. Now I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her lock me out. And since Brenda didn’t have a house cleaner I could barge in on, that meant I’d have to break and enter.

The legal deadline was motivation to make a timetable, and the simple act of purchasing a plane ticket set the wheels in motion, turning thought into deed. Fred had a script in production so I had to find some other accomplice, preferably someone bigger and stronger than me, which meant almost anybody. Liz Stone suggested this kid we knew in elementary school, Barry Lerner. I had no idea she was in touch with Barry. “We had a thing a couple of years ago,” Liz said. “No big deal. The point is Barry’s a drug dealer. He has a gun.” Are you nuts? I said. But soon I was taken with the gun idea—as a deterrent, of course. I could see Brenda walking in and physically threatening me. Barry Lerner the drug dealer would point his gun at Brenda and she’d have to back off. It was a sign of how obsessed I was, that I thought a gun was a good idea. Fred said I was out of my mind.

“The only way this is going to get done is if I’m out of my mind,” I said.

“Fine, OK, but stay away from this creep Barry Lerner, whoever he is,” said Fred.

“Don’t worry, I never slept with the guy. Liz did, though.”

“No guns, Joanna.”

Who was Fred to tell me what to do? But he was right about the gun. So I came up with an alternative. Shep Levine. He’d seen how awful Brenda was firsthand. He was perfect—middle-aged and responsible, but with a sense of adventure. He didn’t hesitate. “Just tell me when,” said Shep.

I started getting excited. I felt happy for the first time since my father died. I was manic. The more I thought about self-help the more it seemed like the most important thing I would ever do. I was going to break into the house I grew up in and kidnap myself. I was going to break down the castle gate and get back homeward. I sang out: She came in through the bathroom window, protected by a silver spoon. Well, no silver spoon for me. And I couldn’t count on Brenda leaving the windows unlocked, could I? So I’d have to bring tools. I’d have to get a crowbar somewhere. I could buy one at the hardware store probably, or some place like K-Mart. You didn’t need a permit for a crowbar, as far as I knew. I decided not to mention the crowbar to Fred. I lay awake worrying about it. What if I was caught with a crowbar? Or the K-Mart receipt? What if Shep was caught with a crowbar? I decided I would have to call Darleen’s husband Travis after all. I wasn’t going to ask Travis to take stuff out of the house or to be on the premises when I made the score. But maybe after repairing something for Brenda, he could forget to lock the door behind him.

Darleen answered the phone. She wanted to know how the weather was in California. Warm and sunny. I asked her a bunch of questions about Travis. She said he didn’t work for Brenda on a regular basis. He was only over there if Brenda called him with a specific job and there was no way to predict when that would be.

“What’s this about?” Darleen said.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“Oh,” said Darleen. “Because, you know, I have a key.”

How stupid of me! Of course Darleen had a key. Darleen and my father stayed close. That didn’t change after Brenda, or Travis. The key was big. I thanked Darleen multiple times. But even knowing I had the key waiting for me, I could not dog it. The rest of the heist had to be planned out with precision. Nothing left to chance. My flight east was in five days. I plotted in bed in the dark, with Fred’s shoulder listing like a ship in the corner of my eye.

I could not simply arrive in Baltimore one day and waltz over to Cedar Drive assuming Brenda was at work as usual and that she wouldn’t be returning until six p.m. I would have to verify that she was actually at Hutzler’s department store, at her desk in accounting. Unfortunately, I could not call her there to determine her whereabouts since we weren’t on speaking terms. A phone call out of the blue would be suspicious. I’d have to get someone else to call her and act as my virtual lookout. Not my mother or Susan, of course. Brenda would have been suspicious of them, too. And besides, Susan didn’t want anything to do with the break-in. Susan could not understand why I would risk so much for his moldy papers. There were other relatives to employ. Uncle Harry hadn’t yet decided that I’d broken the promise I made to my father, and he was also still on good terms with Brenda. If he called her it wouldn’t smell of anything. He was the kind of guy who’d call someone just to shoot the shit, or maybe he had a reason to call but you could never figure out what that might be. At any rate, Uncle Harry agreed to act as lookout. He had his own stake in the take. He didn’t want Brenda throwing away the orphanage photo album.

Uncle Harry still lived out West, but luckily, he was an early riser. The three-hour time difference wouldn’t be a problem. He would ring up Brenda at seven a.m. his time, ten a.m. Hutzler’s time, on the appointed day. As soon as he confirmed that Brenda was at her desk, he would call to give me the all-clear. But where was he going to call me? Car phones weren’t widely in use in those days, and cell phones were unheard of. You couldn’t just phone somebody on the road. The good part about those days, though, was when you called someone at work that person was definitely at work.

So far, great. Uncle Harry would ring Brenda and we’d know she was at work. But if Uncle Harry then telephoned my mother’s apartment where I’d be staying, in order to give the go-ahead, it would take half an hour for me to get to the house on Cedar Drive. If Brenda ditched work early for some reason, she’d be capable of getting home within that same half-hour and could very well catch me in the act, tiptoeing down the hall like the Pink Panther. It was unlikely Brenda would randomly go home sick, but I didn’t want to chance it. I didn’t want to be thinking about her walking in on me. I wanted to pull off the job confident Brenda was far away and preoccupied.

Therefore I had to find a way station close to the house where I could receive the phone call from Uncle Harry. Shana Bloom’s was an obvious choice. She lived only five minutes from Cedar Drive. Shana laughed in delight when I asked if we could use her place as a safe house. She loved the scheme. She was an old commie. Shana hung out with my mother at the YCL in the forties, although Shana denied it. Even her kids didn’t know. But I knew, and figured she still had some red blood flowing in her veins. “I’ll have coffee and cake waiting,” Shana said. Those commies knew how to cater a meeting.

Everything was falling into place. I didn’t need to case the joint. I knew it like I’d grown up there. I had my crew together. Shep would ride shotgun. He was my bagman. I didn’t need a second-story man since it was a ranch house. Shana provided the safe house, and Uncle Harry was lookout.

I was worried about Hoffman, though. Hoffman started getting aggressive after my father died. Sometimes he freaked out around people. He might start barking at Shep Levine. He might even try to attack him. I asked a friend who was a dog groomer about giving Hoffman a dog tranquilizer. “Do I need a prescription?”

She laughed. “It’s called a bone,” she said.

I told my mother to stop at the butcher’s on the night my plane got in.

“Why does the damn dog need a whole leg of lamb?” my mother said.

“Not the whole thing. Just the bone,” I said. “I want a big one.”

My mother wasn’t sure whether to cook the bone and neither was I. She decided to stick it in the oven. We should have left it raw.

I landed at BWI airport and drove a dark blue Ford Taurus out of the Hertz parking lot and went straight to Darleen’s. She opened the door of her little A-frame house in Catonsville, and before she said hello, she silently handed over the key, knowing how much I needed the physical fact of it. It was just a key, no key ring. From the door, I could see Travis in the back room leaning over his workbench. I put the key in my pocket. I was itching to be on my way, but once Darleen started talking, she kept going and I sensed she was stalling because, as she told me once, the way I talked with my hands and described stuff reminded her of my father, and she missed him terribly. I was finally able to leave, and I drove over to my mother’s apartment. The smell of roasting meat flooded the stairwell. “I got it!” I said, holding up the key. We hugged. My mother wasn’t perfect, but we were friends.

“Something smells good,” I said.

“Leg of lamb,” said my mother.

The next morning, Shep and I met at Shana Bloom’s to wait for Uncle Harry’s phone call. Shana had a crumb cake waiting as promised, and a pot of coffee on a trivet in the dining room, but I wasn’t hungry. I was wired. I had a few green garbage bags—the big kind for leaves—folded up and stuffed in the back pockets of my jeans. The key was in my left front pocket. I kept putting my hand between the layers of denim finding the cool metal, running my fingertips over the grooves. I had the bone in a brown paper bag. I put it on Shana’s coffee table. “Don’t let me forget that,” I said. Shep accepted cake and coffee, cream and sugar. I frowned at him. I didn’t want him getting comfortable.

Suddenly Shana’s living room darkened. Thunder rumbled and a flash of lightening cracked, then the slap and whoosh of rain hitting the asphalt streets and tiny brick houses. The phone rang and I jumped. Shit, could I really go through with this? Would my legs turn into Jello and my feet turn into lead? Would my hands shake so much I couldn’t even try the key? Would I be so afraid that I’d fuck it up? Shana answered the phone. “Hello?” she said, holding back giggles. It was the all-clear from Uncle Harry. Brenda was settled at work, they’d had a nice chat. So Shep and I set out. I was wearing a sweatshirt and I flipped the hood up. Shep held a magazine over his head that he pilfered from Shana’s coffee table and we ran to the car and got in. I drove. We left Shep’s silver Jaguar XKE parked at Shana’s. Way too conspicuous. Besides, the Taurus had a deep trunk.

At the stop sign on Sudbrook Road, I shifted my weight under the steering wheel and slid my hand into my pocket and felt the jagged metal, warm now from the heat of my thigh. I knew the key wasn’t a sure thing. If I were Brenda, I would have changed the locks by this point, no doubt. I would have changed them back in February. But there was a chance she hadn’t. I drove down Alter Street, the windshield wipers whining and slapping. Shep was quiet. I turned left onto Cedar. Even in the storm, the street had the drowsy feel of morning and stirred my heart. There was a particular texture to the weekday hours before noon on Cedar Drive, a sleepy wonderfulness that was the feeling of waking up when you were so little you weren’t even in school. I turned into the driveway and Shep and I got out of the car lashed by the rain once again and slammed the car doors, and ran for the carport. I held the screen door open with my hip and inserted the key. Somehow my hands weren’t shaking at all, not even a little bit. The key slipped right in and the doorknob turned and the door opened. I was fine. My heart was beating at a remarkably normal rate, and why not? I was home.

I scratched Hoffman behind the ears and gave him the goddamn bone. I was calmer than I’d been in months. The rain pattered contentedly on the gravel roof, the way rain always did in summer. This was the last time I would hear it.

I was calm, but Shep wasn’t calm. As soon as we got inside he put his back flat against the wall, which made me laugh. He wasn’t laughing, or even smiling. I couldn’t see the dimples that normally made grooves in his cheeks. I had been so worried about involving Darleen’s husband, yet I minimized the risk Shep was taking on my behalf. Shep had no trusting relationship with Brenda to breach, which was good, but in that case then, what the hell was he doing in her house? Gee, I don’t know, Officer.

“Hurry up!” Shep said.

What was the matter with him? Things were going fine. I was just exactly where I wanted to be, where I had been trying to get to all along. I had no fear at all, strangely. The pictures of me all over the place helped. The goddamn Indian table was still there. She didn’t have a clue, that Brenda. I went into his bedroom. The sailor suit photograph was back on its nail. I popped it off and into the leaf bag, then wandered around the house struck with wonder. All the life that went on there. I had to snap out of it, so I focused and went in search of the suitcase with the Bakelite handle. No way she’d put it back in the closet. If she hadn’t thrown it out already, and that was a possibility, she would have hidden it somewhere. I looked in the closet anyway, and there it was. Packed and ready to go. Shep went outside and plopped it into the deep Taurus trunk. I continued working on the den, scooping papers and clippings from the bottom desk drawer into the leaf bag. The little pink giraffe gazed down from its perch on the desk blotter. “Don’t worry. I won’t forget you,” I said. I wrapped it in a Kleenex.

“Hurry up!” Shep said again.

Everything was fine. Hoffman was slurping at his bone in the hallway, holding it between his paws licking and clacking the bone against his teeth.

“We have to get out of here,” said Shep. “I’m pretty sure the lady next door saw us. She was peeking out of her curtains.

“The slides from Ireland! I forgot about these.” Four little orange Kodak slide boxes. “Shep, can you get the ladder from the utility room?”

“You must be kidding,” Shep said. He moved sideways down the hallway like a cop in the projects. I tried not to laugh. “Someone saw us next door,” he said.

“Mrs. Rollins? On the carport side?” I said. “She knows me. She’s nice. She and her husband helped me shovel the walk after the big snowstorm.”

“She’s Brenda’s neighbor, Joanna. I’m not comfortable with this.”

“We have to get the ladder. I have to go into the attic.”

“It’s time to go, Joanna.”

Shep carried out my father’s Jackson Pollack imitation. It was too big for the trunk so he put it in the backseat. Then he came back in and took me by the shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but this is all you’re taking. We have to get out of here. No more time.”

Goodbye! Goodbye house. Rain on the gravel roof, the smell of summer through the screen, the neglected garden, my father gone. Shep steered me around Hoffman who ignored us, his world was all bone, through the kitchen door and down the driveway, rain splashing our faces. I forgot something. I ran back and turned the key and I was in before Shep could stop me, scooted inside and grabbed the Indian table with the elephant legs and I ran out again, closed the door tight, down the driveway, lowered the table into the trunk and slammed the trunk shut, got into the driver’s seat with Shep already riding shotgun, and I backed out. “All right!” I yelled. I was triumphant, unlike the last time I tried to get my stuff and backed out of the driveway. We didn’t get everything, but we had a pretty good haul.

Shep relaxed. “Baby, we did it!” he said. His grin was back, dimples and all. I felt like a million bucks. We talked and laughed the whole way to Shana’s where I dropped Shep at his Jag. Euphoric though we were, Shep admitted being relieved to part company with the likes of me. I drove straight to Mailboxes Unlimited, dropped off a shipment, and headed to the airport. For the six-hour flight to LA I stayed put in my seat—no bathroom breaks—my lap weighed down, my arms wrapped around the suitcase with the yellow handle.