Kate Braverman
A GOOD DAY FOR SEPPUKU
SHORT STORIES
O’HARE
I love O’Hare Airport, with its unpredictable weather and constant gate and terminal changes. This is where I board my plane to Los Angeles. O’Hare is a zone with variables that can’t be controlled. Cell phone service ceases and nobody can tell me no.
I wander corridors that end in cul-de-sacs where I sit alone in alcoves. Loudspeakers announce implausible destinations like Madrid, Prague and Tokyo. I pretend I’m someone else. I have a red or black passport, a different genetic code and a suitcase full with lace mantillas and hand-embroidered shawls. I’m subject to random acts of nature — lightning storms, tornadoes and lethal black ice. But that’s at a distance so vast it’s incomprehensible and irrelevant.
It’s the summer of my 13th year and I’m supposed to make my decision. I must choose which parents I’ll live with for high school and what foreign language I’ll learn. I’m officially a teenager. I have a biological passport and carry tampons, lip-gloss and credit cards in my purse. My age has 2 syllables. And I count everything.
When I live with my mother and Marty in Beverly Hills, my bedroom is entirely Gucci pink — the walls and carpets, the cabinets with my TV and CD player, even the interior of my clothing and shoe closets. My mother took her vintage spring purse to a paint store and supervised the replication of a color only I possess.
My bedroom opens onto a tiled balcony where I can see the tennis court and swimming pool that’s lit even at night. Halogen globes make shadows in the water seem alive and insistent, as if urgently communicating in a language I will someday decipher.
It’s a June of Hibiscus and Magenta Bougainvillea. Night blooming Jasmine from Madagascar turns my skin fragrant. Marty says money alters planetary orbits and renders footnotes unnecessary. He indicates the terraced hillside garden surrounding the swimming pool.
“Race ipsa loquitur,” he says expansively, agreeing with himself.
“And you only need a sweater at night,” my mother adds.
My mother drives me to school in the mornings, even though it’s only 4 blocks away. She wears a tennis dress and matching sweatband around her forehead. Walking is déclassé, she explains. It’s for latchkey children. Or orphans. Or children of maids and gardeners illegally obtaining a Beverly Hills school experience.
“Walking is for peripherals,” she clarifies.
On Wednesdays we have our hair and nails done at Diva Salon on Rodeo Drive. In a curtained room dense with Philodendrons and musk incense, we’re given identical terrycloth robes lined with peach silk. A miniature Purple Orchid like a severed crab claw is tucked in the pocket. A willowy woman bows as she extends the robes like an offering.
We select identical colors for our manicures and pedicures. We are lacquered with apricot or strawberry. Then we meet Marty for dinner at the Club or Mr. Chow’s, where we have our own table permanently reserved for us. On holidays, we attend services at Sinai Temple on Wilshire Boulevard with all the movie stars and industry executives.
The executives wear suits and have their own yarmulkes. The directors are bearded; their hair is long and uncombed and their borrowed yarmulkes perch uncertainly on their matted curls and keep falling off. They wear sunglasses and talk throughout the service. They make rectangles with their index fingers and thumbs. It’s a geometry meant to show camera angles and close-ups.
On long weekends, we drive to Palm Springs or the beach house in Malibu. In between, Marty is invited to concerts at the Greek Theater and the Sports Arena. We don’t need tickets like peripherals. Marty’s name is on The List. We sit in the first or second row and go backstage with our special passes. We eat petit fours and palm-sized pizzas from Spago’s with the bands. I shake hands with Mick Jagger, who wears a purple bonnet, and David Bowie, who wears lipstick. Steven Tyler shows me how to play a tambourine and lets me keep it.
Marty knows everyone because he’s a record producer with 22 Grammy nominations and 9 Grammy Awards. When he greets a performer, his smile is suddenly abnormally wide, his teeth are enormous and inordinately white, and his hand reaches out as if by a mechanical extending device. It elongates dangerously and I think of the trunks of elephants and ivory tusks, swamps, cemeteries and poaching.
I watch the news with my mother. A river is swelling beyond its sand-bagged banks and houses look amputated at ground level. They drift past like a square armada with chimneys and dogs on leashes barking, and porches of Wisteria still attached.
“It doesn’t figure,” my mother says, filing her fingernails.
“The flood?” I ask.
“Floods. Rivers. They don’t figure. Corn doesn’t figure. Trailer parks with the obese in bathrobes don’t figure.” My mother pats my shoulder and smiles. “You’ll learn.”
A soaking wet woman who has never been to Diva Salon holds a sodden cat and a chair frame. Storms took her house, her daughter’s prom corsage, her son’s purple heart, and her marriage certificate. She points behind her floral printed bathrobe and indicates wood slats and glass panes scattered in mud. She’s obviously a peripheral.
One afternoon I hear my mother say, “It’s untenable.” She’s talking to my father on the telephone. “Why?” My mother holds the receiver in front of her eyes and stares at it like it’s an object of alien technology. “You’re joking.”
My father does not tell jokes. He’s laconic and rations his syllables. I imagine stray birds lodge in his lungs. If he laughed without warning, flocks of finches, the pink and yellow of chalk would fly out. Then I’d gather iridescent feathers and line a winter coat for him.
It’s the word untenable that catches my attention. I would have passed barefoot through the living room, with its floor of hand-painted Italian tiles and Persian rugs with authenticated stamped certificates Marty keeps locked in his office safe. I might have crouched behind rows of Cymbidiums in 42 cloisonné pots. But the harsh certainty of the word, untenable, stops me.
Untenable sounds ominous and ugly, like all the un words — unlikely, unhealthy, unemployed, unfortunate and unhappy. Un words are like pointed stakes in a field with No Trespassing signs.
“She’ll be in high school this fall. We’re talking educational sequences with profound continuity implications.” My mother is drinking brandy from a bottle she conceals in a cloisonné planter. My mother is in AA and she’s not allowed to drink.
“Listen, old pal,” my mother raises her voice. Her mouth is tight with frustration as if it has wires in it. Her eyes are cluttered like a pond overgrown with reeds and fallen red and yellow maple leaves like stained glass panels from a cathedral.
“It takes two weeks to wash the hillbilly off her. What about her interior? How’s that going to wash off?” My mother finishes her brandy.
At dinner my mother watches my mouth. Her eyes are magnifiers. From the shape of my lips, she’ll get an early warning. Selecting a foreign language has implications about character that last a lifetime like an appendicitis scar. Spanish is the language of the underclass. It’s for bus boys and their girlfriends who won’t get abortions because they believe God is watching. They’re peripherals who don’t figure. French, on the other hand, is the language of museums, fashion and money, style, diplomacy and ballet.
“There really is no choice,” my mother decides for me.
I leave for Camp Hillel every June no matter where I live. But this time I recognize it’s a definitive moment. It’s a punctuation I didn’t anticipate and don’t want. I thought I could avoid this entirely, sleep through it or disappear in O’Hare. I’m like Alpine denied clearance to land, condemned to repeat monotonous circles. If it explodes in a cornfield or trailer park, it won’t figure.