Around my neck, the amethyst glinted. Before, I would have hidden it in the toe of a sock crammed into a shoe in the closet. But here, we wore our jewelry. We deserved it. "When a woman has jewelry, she wears it," Claire had explained. I had jewelry now. I was a girl with jewelry.
I tried on Claire's double strand of pearls in the mirror, ran the smooth, lustrous beads through my fingers, touched the coral rose of the clasp. The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.
"Dinner at eight? That would be grand," I said to myself in the mirror, like Katharine Hepburn, my fingers looped in the pearls.
Claire had a picture of me on her bureau, next to one of her and Ron, in a sterling silver frame. Nobody had ever framed a picture of me and set it on the dresser. I took the hem of my T-shirt, huffed on the glass and shined it. She had taken it a couple of weeks before, at the beach. I was squinting into the camera, laughing at something she said, my hair paler than the sand. She didn't frame the one I took of her, covered from head to toe in a long beach wrap, Chinese hat, and sunglasses. She looked like the Invisible Man. She only disrobed to go into the water, wading out to her thighs. She didn't like to swim.
"I know it's ridiculous," shexsaid, "but I keep thinking I'm going to be sucked out to sea."
It wasn't the only thing she was afraid of.
She was afraid of spiders and supermarkets and sitting with her back to the door. "Bad chi," she said. She hated the color purple, and the numbers four and especially eight. She detested crowds and the nosy lady next door, Mrs. Kromach. I thought I was afraid of things, but Claire was way ahead of me. She joked about her fears, but it was the kind of joke where you knew people thought it was ridiculous, and you pretended you thought so too, but underneath you were completely serious. "Actors are always superstitious," she said.
She did my numerology. I was a 50, which was the same as a 32.1 had the power to sway the masses. She was a 36, which was the same as a 27, the Scepter. A number of courage and power. She used to be a 22 before she was married, a 4. Very bad. "So you see, Ron saved my life." She laughed uneasily.
I couldn't imagine ever having, or wanting to have, the power to sway the masses, but if it made her feel good, I figured, what was the harm. I helped her out with projects meant to boost good chi. One day we bought square mirrors and I actually climbed to the roof of the house to put them on the red tiles, facing Mrs. Kromach's house. "So her bad chi will bounce back on her, the old bag."
There was a rose trellis over the front path, and she didn't like people who wouldn't go through it. Only goodness and love can pass through a rose arch, she said. She was uneasy if someone came in the back door. She wouldn't let me wear black. The first time I did, she told me, "Black belongs to Saturn, he's unfriendly to children."
I took off her pearls and put them back in the case under the scarves in her top left drawer. She kept most of her jewelry in a paper bag in the freezer, where she thought burglars wouldn't find it. But the pearls couldn't take being frozen, they had to stay warm.
In the right two drawers were her silk things, in light mid-tones, champagne and shell pink and ice blue, slips and nightgowns, bras and panties that matched. Everything folded and tucked with sachets. Below that, T-shirts in neat stacks, a white stack and a colored pile, celadon, mauve, taupe. To the left, shorts and light sweaters. Shawls on the bottom. Her winter clothes lay folded and sealed in zippered cases at the top of the closet.
This instinct to order and rituals was one of the things I liked best about Claire, her calendars and rules. She knew when it was time to put winter clothes away. I loved that. Her sense of order, graceful and eccentric, little secrets women knew, lingerie bags and matching underwear. She threw out my Starr underthings, full of holes, and bought me all new ones at a department store, discussing the fit of bras with the elderly saleslady. I wanted satin and lace, black and emerald green, but Claire gently overruled me. I pretended she was my mother and whined a bit before giving in.
CLAIRE HAD new photographs taken, actor's head shots. We went to Hollywood to pick them up from a shop on Cahuenga. In photographs, she looked different, focused, animated. In person she was thin, dreamy, as full of odd angles as a Picasso mademoiselle. The photographer, an old Armenian man with a sleepy eye, thought I should have photographs too. "She could model," he said to Claire. "I've seen worse."
My hand instinctively rose to touch the scars on my jaw. Couldn't he see how ugly I was?
Claire smiled, stroked my hair. "Would you like that?"
"No," I said, low, so the photographer wouldn't hear me.
"We'll keep it in mind," Claire said.
On the way back to the car in the heat of a pigeon-wing-pale afternoon, we passed an old hippie man with gray hair and a green army surplus bag strapped to his chest, asking people for money. Passersby shouldered his outstretched paper cup aside and crossed the street. He wasn't menacing enough for this line of work. I thought of myself panhandling in the liquor store parking lot, but it wasn't the same. I wasn't an alkie, a drug addict. I was only fifteen. He'd done it to himself.
"Come on," he said. "Help a guy out."
I was ready to cross, to escape this scarecrow of a man, but Claire looked over at him. She didn't know how to ignore people.
"Can you spare some change, lady? Anything'11 help."
The light changed, but Claire wasn't paying attention. She was digging in her purse, emptying out her change. She never learned about street people, that if you showed them the least little kindness, they'd latch onto you like castor seeds. Claire only saw how thin he was, the limp where he must have been hit by a car while panhandling between traffic lights. My mother would have offered to shove him out in front of a bus, but Claire cared. She believed in the commonality of the soul.
The hippie man pocketed the money. "You're a real human being, lady. Most people won't look a man in the eye when he's down." He gave me an accusing look. "I don't care if a guy gives me something, I just want him to look me in the eye, you know what I'm saying?"