White Oleander - Janet Fitch [11]
Another weekend, he took us to Catalina. I was violently seasick on the ferry, and Barry held a cold handkerchief to my forehead and got me some mints to suck. I loved his brown eyes, the way he looked so worried, as if he’d never seen a kid throw up before. I tried not to hang around with them too much once we got there, hoping he would ask her while they strolled among the sailboats, eating shrimp from a paper cone.
SOMETHING HAPPENED. All I remember is that the winds had started. The skeleton rattlings of wind in the palms. It was a night Barry said he would come at nine, but then it was eleven and he hadn’t arrived. My mother played her Peruvian flute tape to soothe her nerves, Irish harp music, Bulgarian singers, but nothing worked. The calming, chiming tones ill suited her temper. Her gestures were anxious and unfinished.
“Let’s go for a swim,” I said.
“I can’t,” she said. “He might call.”
Finally, she flipped out the tape and replaced it with one of Barry’s, a jazz tape by Chet Baker, romantic, the kind of music she always hated before.
“Cocktail lounge music. For people to cry into their beer with,” she said. “But I don’t have any beer.”
He went out of town on assignments for different magazines. He canceled their dates. My mother couldn’t sleep, she jumped whenever the phone rang. I hated to see the look on her face when it wasn’t Barry. A tone I’d never heard crept into her voice, serrated, like the edge of a saw.
I didn’t understand how this could happen, how he could give us fireworks and Catalina, how he could hold that cold cloth to my forehead, and talk about taking us to Bali, and then forget our address.
ONE AFTERNOON, we stopped by his house unannounced.
“He’s going to be mad,” I said.
“We were just in the neighborhood. Just thought we’d stop by,” she said.
I could no more keep her from doing this than I could keep the sun from coming up through the boiled smog on an August morning, but I didn’t want to see it. I waited in the car. She knocked on the door and he answered wearing a seersucker bathrobe. I didn’t have to hear her to know what she was saying. She wore her blue gauze dress, the hot wind ruffling her hem, the sun at her back, turning it transparent. He stood in his doorway, blocking it, and she held her head to one side, moving closer, touching her hair. I felt a rubber band stretching in my brain, tighter and tighter, until they disappeared into his house.
I played the radio, classical music. I couldn’t stand to hear anything with words. I imagined my own ice-blue eyes looking at some man, telling him to go away, that I was busy. “You’re not my type,” I said coolly into the rearview mirror.
A half hour later she reappeared, stumbling out to the car, tripping over a sprinkler, as if she were blind. She got in and sat behind the steering wheel and rocked back and forth, her mouth open in a square, but there was no sound. My mother was crying. It was the final impossibility.
“He has a date,” she finally said, whispering, her voice like there were hands around her throat. “He made love with me, and then said I had to leave. Because he has a date.”
I knew we shouldn’t have come. Now I wished she’d never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.
I was afraid to let her drive like this, with her eyes wild, seeing nothing. She’d kill us before we got three blocks. But she didn’t start the car. She sat there, staring through the windshield, rocking herself, holding herself around her waist.
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