“Did you have a nice day at school?” she’d ask, drawing up a chair at the little red-and-white kitchen table.
She had some mistaken notion that Fairfax was like high school where she grew up in Connecticut, despite the clear presence of metal detectors at every entrance. I didn’t tell her about the free-for-alls on the school yard, muggings on the bus. A girl burned a cigarette hole into the back of another girl’s shirt at nutrition, right in front of me, looking at me, as if daring me to stop her. I saw a boy being threatened with a knife in the hallway outside my Spanish class. Girls talked about their abortions in gym class. Claire didn’t need to know about that. I wanted the world to be beautiful for her. I wanted things to work out. I always had a great day, no matter what.
ON SATURDAY, Ron mowed the lawn, cutting the heads off the primroses, and then settled into reading some scripts. We had lox and bagels for breakfast, and Claire went to her ballet class. I sat with my paints next to Ron at the table. I was getting used to him. He didn’t try to be any friendlier than I wanted.
“How does Claire seem to you?” he asked all of a sudden. He looked at me over the tops of his glasses like an old man.
“Fine,” I said.
But I had some idea what he was talking about. Claire paced at night, I heard her bare feet on the floorboards. She talked as if silence would crush her if she didn’t prop it up with a steady stream of sound. She cried easily. She took me to the observatory and started crying in the star show. The April constellations.
“You have my pager number, you know. You can always reach me.”
I kept painting the way the poinsettia looked against the white wall of the house. Like a shotgun blast.
CLAIRE PUSHED back the muslin curtain, glanced out at the street. She was waiting for Ron. It was still light out, moving toward summer, a six o’clock honeyed twilight.
“I think Ron is having an affair,” she said.
I was surprised. Not at the thought—I knew the reason she would stop talking when he was on the phone, the way she would gently probe him to discover his whereabouts. But that she would say it aloud indicated a progression of her doubts.
I thought about Ron. His smoothness. Sure, he could get women anytime he wanted. But he worried too much about Claire. If he was messing around, why would he care? And he worked hard, long hours, always came home tired. He wasn’t that young. I didn’t think he had the energy.
“He’s just working,” I said.
Claire peered out into the street from behind the curtain. “So he says.”
“HAVE YOU seen my keys?” Ron asked. “I’ve looked everywhere for them.”
“Take mine,” Claire said. “I can have another set made.”
“Yeah, but it bugs me that I’m losing things. They’ve got to be around here somewhere.”
He took Claire’s keys, but it bothered him. He was a highly organized man.
One day, I saw Claire take a pen from Ron’s inside jacket pocket, slip it into her jeans.
“Have you seen my Cross pen?” he asked a few days later.
“No,” she said.
He frowned at me. “Did you take it, Astrid? Tell me the truth, I won’t be upset. It’s just things are disappearing and it’s driving me crazy. I’m not accusing you of stealing them, but did you borrow it and not put it back?”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to rat on Claire, but I didn’t want him thinking I was stealing from him either. I would do anything not to lose this placement. “I didn’t take it, really. I wouldn’t.”
“I believe you,” he said, running his hand through his silver hair. “I must be getting senile.”
“Maybe it’s poltergeists,” Claire said.
When Claire went out for an audition, I searched the house methodically. Under their bed I found a box painted red and white and decorated with pieces of broken mirror. Inside, it was also red, and full of the things that he’d been missing—an army knife, a watch, his stapler, scissors, keys, nail clippers. There was a Polaroid of them laughing, and two Polaroids glued together face-to-face, I couldn’t pry them apart. A magnet hung from the lid of the box, and a steel plate was glued to the bottom. I could feel the tug of the magnet as I replaced the lid.
17
I FINISHED the tenth grade at the end of June. I did incredibly well, considering. C in algebra, it was a mercy grade, they never give out D’s as final grades in honors classes. But with Claire’s nightly help, I got A’s in English and history, world art and biology, even Spanish. If she had asked me to go out for football, I would have done that too. To celebrate, Ron took us to Musso and Frank, a restaurant right on Hollywood Boulevard. I’d never noticed it before. Just down from the last apartment I lived in with my mother.
We parked in back and walked down the stairs with their polished brass railings, past the old-fashioned kitchen. We could see the chefs cooking. It smelled like stew, or meat loaf, the way time should smell, solid and nourishing. We walked single file past the scarred wooden counter, people eating steaks and chops and reading Variety, warmed by the grill fires, served by old men waiters in green-and-red jackets. It was a time warp, flash frozen in 1927. I liked it, it made me feel safe.
We were seated in the back room. Ron knew people. He introduced us—“my wife, Claire,” and for a moment I thought he was going to introduce me as their daughter. But it was “and our friend Astrid.” I beat back the sharpness of my disappointment with the thought that Marvel wouldn’t have bothered to introduce me at all, and Amelia, well, we were lucky to get fed.
I drank my Shirley Temple and Claire pointed out movie stars in excited whispers. They didn’t look very glamorous in real life. Smaller than you’d think, dressed plainly, just eating dinner. Jason Robards and another man sat across from us with two bored kids, the men talking business, the kids making bread balls and throwing them at each other.
Claire and Ron split a bottle of wine, and Claire gave me sips from her glass. She touched Ron constantly, his hair, arm, shoulder. I was jealous. I wanted her all to myself. I was aware it wasn’t normal, normal daughters didn’t get jealous of their fathers. They wished both their parents would disappear.
Ron took something from his pocket, concealed in his smooth hand. “For a job well done,” he said.
He put it on my plate. It was a red velvet box, shaped like a heart. I opened it. Inside was a faceted lavender jewel on a gold chain. “Every girl needs a little jewelry,” he said.
Claire clipped it around my neck. “Amethyst is a great healer,” she whispered as she put it on me, kissing me on the cheek. “Only good times now.” Ron leaned forward and I let him kiss me too.
I felt tears coming. They surprised me.
The food arrived and I watched them while we ate, Claire’s dark glossy hair falling against her cheek, her large soft eyes. Ron’s smooth man’s face. I pretended that they were really my parents. The steak and the wine went to my head, and I imagined being the child of Claire and Ron Richards. Who was I, the real Astrid Richards? Doing well in school, of course I was going to college. I listened as they laughed, something about their days at Yale together, though I knew Ron was married to somebody else then, that he dumped his wife for Claire. I imagined myself at Yale, knee-deep in crisp fall leaves, in a thick camel’s hair coat. I sat in dark paneled lecture halls looking at slides of Da Vinci. I was going to study in Tuscany my junior year. On Parents’ Day, Claire and Ron came to visit, Claire wearing her pearls. She showed me where her dorm was.