Golden State (3 page)

“You look good, Natalie,” she said after our embrace. “Prosperous.”

It was her way of saying I’d gained a few pounds. I tried not to feel hurt. Sara was Sara. She had her nightgown stuffed in a brown paper bag to spend the weekend with our mother.

We had lunch in the dining room on my mother’s new blond-oak table. She’d divided the contents of the old house among her three children according to a plan that was hers alone. The Oriental rugs, Stickley dining table, and the china went to me, the matching sideboard, the glassware, and Roseville pottery to Sara, the framed etchings to Bobby, who lived alone in a one-room shack without electricity or plumbing.

Out of old habit, I pressed my thumb against the handle of my fork, but there was no embossed flower to imprint into my flesh. This wasn’t my great-grandmother’s silver, I suddenly realized, the silver my mother had taught me to polish because Sara always refused. She said it was a waste of time. But I loved watching the tarnish go away, working next to my mother as she passed on the family stories: how my great-great-great-grandmother Kristin had crossed the Sierras in a covered wagon carrying a silver spoon from her mother. How years later, her granddaughter Lillian had swept into Gump’s in San Francisco with the same spoon and ordered the pattern remade in a service for sixteen. One day, my mother used to tell me, the set would be mine to pass on to my own daughter.

Until that moment, I hadn’t understood it was gone.

I took a bite of salad, but I couldn’t swallow. Four years after the fact, the cold logic of what my mother had done choked me. She might have bequeathed me the story of Kristin and Lillian, but she’d handed over their sterling to Bobby. She’d given him what he could easily sell.

“You’re not eating,” my mother said.

I was forty-eight years old. There was nothing to say. I took another bite.

We had coffee and cookies for dessert. Neither Sara nor I had thought to pick up cake—not that my mother would have cared about one. She hated fuss.

I kissed my mother good-bye at the door, and Sara walked me to the
car. “Did you ever think Mother would choose to live in a place with a little guard and an up-down thing?” Sara waved her arm like a crossing bar.

“I never thought she’d move from the old house,” I said. “I never thought she’d do a lot of things.”

Sara squinted at me. “What’s up with you today? Where’d you stash your usual Chatty Cathy self?”

Her remark caught me off guard. Sara wasn’t particularly attuned to other people’s emotions. If I ever had to survive the crash of a small plane in the Alaskan tundra, there’s no one I’d rather have at my side. But I wasn’t bleeding, freezing, or starving. I was standing beside Eric’s Lexus parked behind a bed of perfectly maintained pansies.

“I don’t know,” I said. I doubted that Sara would understand. I’d believed my mother when she told me the story of the spoon that Kristin brought with her into California from a home and a family that she would never see again, a spoon remade into a set that passed from daughter to daughter. I’d believed it meant something about family and the history we pass on. Maybe I’d confused it with love.

Sara gave me a quizzical look as she pulled a small purple pipe and lighter from her shift pocket and cupped them in her hand. She checked behind her. Then she lit her pipe and took a deep, pungent drag.

I stepped back from the pot smoke, agitated, aggrieved. “Did you know Mother gave Bobby the family silver?”

“Maybe she wanted him to set a lovely table,” she said when her lungs had cleared.

My laugh was dry. I wished I hadn’t said anything.

“You need to let it go,” she said. “They’re just knives and forks. And Mom will never accept that Bobby is what he is.”

“What he is, is a monumental loser,” I said, surprising myself. I never spoke about Bobby that way.

“He’s not a big-time lawyer. I’ll give you that.”

I let that go. “Don’t you think about him?”

She shrugged. “He’s just some person out there. I cultivate my own garden.”

I pictured her in a straw hat, holding a hoe. It made me smile. But neither one of us was being truthful. There was a vanishing at the center of our lives, a brother gone so far from us that he had all but disappeared. Not just some person out there. Not a loser, but painfully, inexplicably lost.

chapter four

I
WAS TEN YEARS OLD
, and my world was about to end. I had one brother and Princeton was taking him from me. They were going to pay his way. They’d even pay for his toothpaste. A professor from the math department called our house in Sacramento to tell Bobby he’d have a ball there.

At another house, the invitation might have been a bigger deal. At ours, going to Princeton meant you couldn’t go to Berkeley.

Berkeley was an idea to my family as much as a university, the summit of a statewide system second to none, a place where kids arriving on Greyhound buses with thirty dollars in their pockets could get the finest education the country had to offer. It was an idea my father, as a political strategist and a top aide to Governor Pat Brown, had helped make real. The proposal he shepherded had a dull name, the Master Plan for Higher Education, but there was nothing dull about the outcome: the best in public higher education, accessible to all Californians tuition-free, four new state colleges, three new university campuses, Berkeley rated first in the country. But my brother chose Princeton. “Smaller classes,” he said.

“You’ll hate the snobbery,” my father said.

“He’s only sixteen. I worry about him going so far away,” I overheard my mother tell my father. But neither parent said he couldn’t go.

Since they weren’t going to stop my brother, the job fell to me. When I wandered casually into his room, Bobby was at his built-in desk under the window, constructing one of his model planes. He made his
models from scratch with balsa wood, using the instructions printed in a book with minuscule type. He hung the finished planes from the ceiling, even the one that Mother hated. It was a red-nosed Japanese Zero. He’d constructed the cockpit from tiny bits of plastic, and I’d been in his room for the argument. “Those planes attacked us at Pearl Harbor,” my mother said. “I don’t want to see one displayed.”

“It’s not the plane’s fault it belonged to the enemy,” Bobby had said.

The Zero with the bright rising suns stayed. Bobby was the only person in the family who could ever win an argument with Mother.

I readied my case as I sat crossed-legged on his bed in shorts, the raised stripes of the bedspread pressing against my bare legs.

“What’s up, chipmunk?” he asked, his pale, steady hands affixing one tiny sliver of balsa to another.

“It’s about Dad,” I said.

“What?” Bobby sounded surprised, as if I might know something he didn’t.

“He’s going to be really hurt if you don’t go to Berkeley.”

“Dad will be fine,” Bobby said, turning back to his plane.

I arranged the pillow behind my back, lifted my head to the planes suspended from the ceiling. Bobby was right. Dad never seemed anything but fine. Aiming for nonchalance, I watched the models on their slender wires float slowly in the breeze. “I heard that at Princeton the rich kids smash the model planes of the poor kids.”

His head bent over his work, Bobby nodded. “Thanks for telling me. I’ll leave them here.”

I recognized the tone. It was my father’s: kindly, amused, a tone used exclusively on me, the permanent youngest. If my brother moved far away, I wouldn’t be able to bear it, but I suddenly hated him the way I hated Sara, who never let me near her room, her friends, or her things.

“Mom says you’re too young to go to Princeton, and nobody there will be your friend.”

I spoke like that to my sister every day. I’d use anything on her, stuff I’d overheard, made up. But Bobby wasn’t Sara. My chest heaved from the weight of what I’d said, the truth at the heart of my lie.

“I was thinking you could visit me sometime,” he said. He didn’t seem angry about what I’d just said. He sounded the way he always did, serious, thoughtful, and easy. “Fly out alone when you’re twelve or thirteen.”

You could build a nation on Bobby’s promises. I pictured it: me flying across the country by myself, sitting by the window, eating lunch off a tray, carrying my suitcase off the plane. I’d wear nylons and straighten them on the tarmac.

I let Princeton have him. When he came home at Christmas, my mother said he was too thin. I asked him if we could move up my visit by a year. He said he’d think about it.

When Bobby returned for the summer, I went with my parents to the airport. He didn’t look like himself anymore. His hair was scraggly, his neck so scrawny that his Adam’s apple looked enormous, his skin gray in the fluorescent light of the terminal. When I rushed to throw my arms around him, he didn’t laugh or call me chipmunk or squirt. At home, he slept late into the day, and I no longer read comic books in his room.

“Bobby’s different,” I complained to my mother.

“That’s just the way college kids are,” she said.

My father didn’t seem to think so. He wanted Bobby out of bed and doing something. I heard my parents arguing about it.

Sara said it was Bobby’s problem if he was unhappy at college.

When I went to Girl Scout camp, Bobby wrote that he envied my sojourn in the wilderness. It was the first time he’d ever said he envied something about my life and I wanted camp to last all summer. In September, Bobby went back to college, Sara began her new life as cheerleader, and I started sixth grade.

Two months later, Bobby came home.

“It’s not Christmas,” I said to my mother. “It’s not any other holiday. How come Bobby’s home?” I should have been overjoyed, but instead I was cautious. Something was wrong with my big brother, and I didn’t understand why no else noticed.

“He needs to rest,” my mother said.

The next week, his belongings came in boxes in the mail.

He stayed in his room all day. His door was closed to me, but I didn’t care as much as I once would have. I had my own life now. I hung out at the shopping center with my friends and wore lipstick behind my mother’s back. My mother was now someone I had to get around.

Sara was hardly ever home. She was either at school, cheerleading, or going somewhere in a car driven by a boy.

At night, Bobby ate with us silently, looking only at his plate. Other than Sara and me, no one in our family had ever done much arguing. Now Bobby and my father battled constantly, their voices loud and desperate.

I argued with my mother about wearing makeup, about going places with my friends. We fought about my hair, the red hair I hated. Finally, I bought a six-pack of black dye capsules and used them all at once. I was on my way out the door with my new raven hair when my mother stopped me.

“You’re not going anywhere until you wash that crap out of your hair.” She actually said
crap
.

“It’s my hair,” I said. “You can’t stop me.”

When she ordered me back upstairs, it drove me over the line.

“You’re just jealous because your hair is gray and ugly. You look like Daddy’s mother.”

It wasn’t true. My mother may have refused to dye her prematurely gray hair, but she was still young and beautiful. But there was something special about my father. His looks, his effortless glamour, had an immediate effect on women. They lit up for him. Even I had seen it.

I’d wanted to hurt my mother, and I sensed I had. I blamed her for the changes in our family I couldn’t even see had taken place.

chapter five

I
BURROWED DEEPER
under the covers. Sunday meant I could sleep as late as I wanted, as the girls would permit. But there was so much to do. Christmas vacation was only a week away. I had to finish shopping, get started on the cards, order Lilly’s doll. I needed to firm up holiday plans with my mother. We might have let her back out of Thanksgiving, but there was no way she was getting out of Christmas.

I heard Julia’s footsteps on our bedroom floor. She climbed in next to me. “Mom,” she said, touching my shoulder. Her voice was tremulous. I turned over, looked at her. She’d been crying. I asked what the matter was.

“I wish I could still believe,” she said. “It’s so sad when it’s gone.”

“When what’s gone?” I asked, brushing the hair from her face. My mother said we indulged the kids too much. I didn’t remember ever crawling in bed with my parents. That bedroom door was shut.

“The magic,” she said.

I wanted to laugh, but she looked so serious. I pulled her close, and said I understood, sensing she was going to keep this up for a while. No one could suffer a loss of faith like Julia. What she needed was an older sister like Sara to toughen her up. Sara once had told me every gift I was getting for Christmas. I don’t know how she knew. I’d had my hands over my ears but she couldn’t be stopped. At Julia’s age, I wore high heels to Christmas dinner, my father and brother in jackets, my mother and sister in dresses and pearls.

I couldn’t remember the last Christmas my parents and the three
of us kids had all been together. I must have been in college. The holiday wasn’t remarkable. I had no idea that my brother would soon stop coming, that I’d barely ever see him again. In the past fourteen years, I’d seen him just once, by accident, six years ago.

My mother was still living in the house on Forty-Sixth Street, the house I thought she’d never sell. The girls had coveted these velvet Christmas dresses we’d seen at Macy’s. I’d wanted them, too. Holly red for two-year-old Lilly, midnight blue for nine-year-old Julia. The finery had led somehow to a visit with my mother. The girls and I drove from Berkeley to Sacramento, to the old house on a Saturday, just for the day, the kids decked out in their new dresses.

We had lunch in the dining room where I’d eaten as a girl, a lady’s lunch with china, embossed silver, and white lace, Lilly eating without a spill. Afterward, we went into the living room. The girls banged on the piano. The doorbell rang, and suddenly there was my brother standing at the edge of the room, a slight man, stooped, in a threadbare jacket, his hair graying and wild.