And the .38? “Only one reason for a thirty-eight. And that’s to kill your man.”
I felt like an Israeli girl soldier, in shorts and the hot wind, sighting down the barrel of the rifle, holding the .38 with both hands. It was a strange feeling, him looking at me as I aimed. I found I couldn’t quite lose myself in the target. His eyes split my attention between the C in Coke and my awareness of him watching me.
And I thought, this was what it was like to be beautiful. What my mother felt. The tug of eyes, pulling you back from your flight to the target. I was in two places at once, not only in my thought, my aim, but my bare feet on the dusty yard, my legs growing stronger, my breasts in the new bra, my long tanned arms, my hair flowing white in the hot wind. He was taking my silence but giving me something in return, a fullness of being recognized. I felt beautiful, but also interrupted. I wasn’t used to being so complicated.
7
IN NOVEMBER, when the air held blue in the afternoons and the sunlight washed the boulders in gold, I turned fourteen. Starr threw me a party, with hats and streamers, and invited Carolee’s boyfriend and even my caseworker, the Jack of Spades. There was a cake from Ralph’s Market with a hula girl in a grass skirt and my name written in blue, and they all sang “Happy Birthday.” The cake had a trick candle that wouldn’t go out, so I didn’t get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.
Carolee bought me a mirror for my purse and Owen and Peter gave me a lizard in a jar with a bow. From Davey I got a big sheet of cardboard on which he’d taped animal scat and Xeroxes of animal tracks to match, with carefully printed labels. Starr’s gift was a green stretchy sweater, and the social worker brought me a set of rhinestone barrettes.
The last gift was from Ray. I carefully opened the paper, and saw the wood, carved and inlaid in the pattern of an art nouveau moonflower, the cover motif of my mother’s first book. I held my breath and took it out of the paper, a wooden jewelry box. It smelled of new wood. I ran my fingers over the moonflower, thought of Ray cutting the pieces, the sinuous edges, fitting them so perfectly you couldn’t feel the transitions in the woods. He must have done it late at night, when I was asleep. I was afraid to show how much I loved it. So I just said, “Thanks.” But I hoped he could tell.
WHEN THE RAINS CAME, the yard turned to deep mud, and the river rose, filling its enormous channel. What had been a big dry wash littered with rocks and chaparral was transformed into a huge dirty torrent the color of a coffee milkshake. Parts of the burnt mountain sighed and gave way. I never thought it could rain so much. We kept putting pots and cartons and jugs under the leaks in Starr’s roof, emptying them in the yard.
It was the break in a seven-year drought, and the rain that had been held back was being delivered, all at once. It lasted without a break through Christmas, leaving us crammed inside the trailer, the boys playing road race and Nintendo and watching a National Geographic double video of tornadoes, over and over again.
I spent my days out on the porch swing, staring out at the rain, listening to its voices on the metal roof and the runoff thundering down the Tujunga, boulders tumbling, trees washed away whole, knocking into one another like bowling pins. Every color turned to a pale brownish gray.
When there was no color, and I was lonely, I thought of Jesus. Jesus knew my thoughts, knew everything, even if I couldn’t see Him, or really feel Him, He would keep me from falling, from being washed away. Sometimes I read the tarot cards, but they were always the same, the swords, the moon, the hanged man, the burning tower with its toppled crown and people falling. Sometimes when Ray was home, he’d come out with his chess set, and we played and he got high, or we’d go out to the shed where he had his workbench set up and he’d show me how to make little things, a birdhouse, a picture frame. Sometimes we’d just talk on the porch, listening to the streetfighting sound effect of the boys’ Double Dragons and Zaxxon video games muffled by rain. Ray propped himself against one of the posts, while I lay on the porch glider, swinging it with one foot.
One day, he came out and smoked his pipe awhile, leaning one shoulder on the porch upright, not looking at me. He seemed moody, his face troubled.
“You ever think about your dad?” he asked.
“I never met him,” I said, stirring with my dangling foot slightly to keep the glider moving. “I was two when he left, or she left him, whatever.”
“She tell you about him?”
My father, that silhouette, a form comprised of all I did not know, a shape filled with rain. “Whenever I asked, she’d say, ‘You had no father. I’m your father. You sprang full-blown from my forehead, like Athena.’ ”
He laughed, but sadly. “Some character.”
“I found my birth certificate once. ‘Father: Anders, Klaus, no middle name. Birthplace: Copenhagen, Denmark. Residing in Venice Beach, California.’ He’d be fifty-four now.” Ray was younger than that.
Thunder rolled, but the clouds were too thick to see lightning. The glider squeaked as I rocked myself, thinking of my father, Klaus Anders, no middle name. I’d found a Polaroid picture of him stuck in a book of my mother’s, Windward Avenue. They were sitting together in a beachside cafe with a bunch of other people who looked like they’d all just come in off the beach—tanned, long-haired people wearing beads, the table covered with beer bottles. Klaus had his arm across the back of her chair, careless and proprietary. They looked like they were sitting in a special patch of sunlight, an aura of beauty around them. They could have been brother and sister. A leonine blond with sensual lips, he smiled all the way and his eyes turned up at the corners. Neither my mother nor I smiled like that.
The picture and the birth certificate were all I had of him, that and the question mark in my genetic code, all that I didn’t know about myself. “Mostly I think about what he would think of me.”
We looked out at the sepia pepper tree, the mud in the yard thick as memory. Ray turned so he could lean his back flat against the post, lifted his hands over his head. His shirt crawled up, I could see his hairy stomach. “He probably thinks you’re still two. That’s how I think of Seth. When the boys are down by the river, I imagine he’s down there with them. I have to remind myself he’s too big for frogs now.”
Klaus thought of me as two. My hair like white feathers, my diaper full of sand. He never imagined that I was grown. I could walk right past him, he might even look at me the way Ray did, and never know it was his own daughter. I shivered, pulled the sleeves of my sweater over my hands.
“Have you ever thought to call him, find him?” I asked.
Ray shook his head. “I’m sure he hates my guts. I know his mother fed him all kinds of crap about me.”
“I bet he misses you, though,” I said. “I miss Klaus and I never even met him. He was an artist too. A painter. I imagine he’d be proud of me.”
“He would be,” Ray said. “Maybe someday you’ll meet him.”
“I think about that sometimes. That when I’m an artist, he’ll read about me in the paper, and see how I turned out. When I see a middle-aged blond man sometimes, I want to call out, Klaus! And see if he turns his head.” I made the glider creak as I pushed myself slowly.
My mother once told me she chose him because he looked like her, so it was as if she were having her own child. But there was a different story in the red Tibetan notebook with the orange binding dated Venice Beach, 1972.