Lilac Mines (16 page)

The address of the newspaper office/salon is also 319 Washoe Street. What if, Felix wonders, the postcard was sent here, and not to the post office? It's not like it's a letter to the editor, but what if Cal worked for the newspaper?

“Any idiots out there this season?” Nora asks Anna Lisa.

“Not yet, but it's only a matter of time. There are always people who think hiking in the off-season is some well-kept secret. They don't stop to realize there's a reason that most people don't head up into the mountains when it might snow any minute.” Anna Lisa doesn't turn her head but calls to Felix, “Nora's husband TJ does search and rescue with me.”

Nora combs and scissors, her acrylic nails clicking. If she lived in L.A., Felix thinks, she'd have layered hair, ironed straight. She'd wear velour sweatsuits. Bits of brown hair fall on Anna Lisa's cloth bib like snowflakes.

“We've known your aunt forever,” Nora says cheerfully. “Me and TJ. She was at our wedding, and just last week she did a lice check on our little girl's class. I still can't believe Charlotte had lice.” She laughs heartily. “How embarrassing, a hairdresser's daughter with lice.”

But she doesn't seem embarrassed. Plastic hearts swing from her earlobes as she laughs.

“How long have you lived here?” Felix asks. She still wants to find old-timers; Nora Banister doesn't look older than 40, but, well, she said she's known Anna Lisa forever.

“Let's see, TJ and I moved here from San Diego just after he got out of the Marines, and before I had Dillon, so… 18 years? Lilac Mines was really just starting up again at that point… right, Anna Lisa?”

“Yep,” Anna Lisa agrees, still not moving her head.

“What do you mean?” Felix is confused. “I thought it stopped being a ghost town in, like, the '40s.”

“Oh no, no,” says Nora, shaking her curly head. “Well, it did—there was a saw mill and such here during World War II and into the '50s and '60s—but by the mid-'70s
no one
was here. Ask around. You won't meet anyone who's lived here longer than 20 years.”

Anna Lisa stares straight ahead.

Felix thinks about the people she's met, oldish people with history. Gary Schipp and Luke Twentyman and the haggard woman next door. Not that she's asked most of them what they were doing in the '70s and '80s. People carry their histories like luggage, and you try to decipher whether it's Louis Vuitton or JanSport or a stickered steamer trunk. Busy strangers. Didn't Luke say something about everyone leaving?

“Well, a few people lived here, off and on,” says Anna Lisa. “But hardly anyone.”

Nora continues, “In the '80s, when real estate in the cities started to skyrocket, people started moving back here in big numbers. It was one place normal folks could still buy a house with a yard bigger than a postage stamp.” Nora plugs an electric shaver into a nearby outlet and expertly mows the nape of Anna Lisa's neck. “We're a double ghost town,” Nora says over the buzz. “Even if there was nothing exciting like a lost girl in a mine to kick off the second round.” She turns off the shaver and steps between Anna Lisa and the mirror to appraise her work. She snips above Anna Lisa's right ear and says, “There. Looking good.”

Then Nora whirls around to face Felix. “Hey, I've got an idea. Let me cut your hair, too. It's looking pretty overgrown.” She is so enthusiastic, in her tight flowered dress, waving her eager scissors, that Felix doesn't have time to feel insulted. Her head is still reeling with the news: while she was searching for what happened a century ago, she didn't bother to notice what happened 30 years ago. Felix finds herself easing into the kinky chair, which is surprisingly comfortable. Anna Lisa smiles her encouragement. Her hair is short and neat.

“Just a trim,” Felix says. She removes the plastic clips from her hair one by one and sprinkles them on the counter. A few strands of coarse brown hair come with them. “Just an inch or two,” she says again. If she were home, she wouldn't mind a good chop, but she wants to minimize any potential damage.

She closes her eyes as Nora cuts. There's something slightly medical about the process, and she thinks of her night in the hospital. The hum and click of alien instruments, being at the mercy of hands that might be good or bad. She forces her thoughts elsewhere.

Where was her aunt during the '70s? Maybe she did have a fabulous queer life, maybe those were her glory years. Maybe she went to a big city and met a nice girl. Or maybe Meg came with her. Maybe they lived in a skinny Victorian in the Castro.

Nora's nails catch on the small silver hoop at the crest of Felix's left ear.

“Ow!”

“Sorry.” But Nora doesn't sound too worried.

Eventually Felix relaxes into the rhythm of the scissors. Her dry hair is so light. She's awed by how easily her hair gives in. Gives up. Now it's on her head, now it's on her shoulders, now it's in a dustpan. It doesn't fight for its place, it just adapts. The difference between dead and alive left to the squeezing of metal handles.

She can't bring herself to watch the mirror, so she slides her gaze over to the parking lot, and beyond that to the cold brown strip of town. There are no dewy trees here to evoke Christmas, just a general gloom. What still surprises her about this part of town is that she never would have guessed there used to be trees here. When she was an obedient Hermosa High Ecology Club member contemplating Depleted Rainforests, she visualized fields of stumps, perhaps a gangly, confused monkey here and there. But the clear-cut portion of Lilac Mines looks as if it always was a stripped field disguised as destiny.

“So… what do you think?” Nora wants to know.

Felix turns toward the mirror. Her hair is short and neat. What she usually spikes up is now flattened down. Nora stands over one shoulder, pink-faced and expectant. Anna Lisa stands over the other, looking exactly like Felix.

It's no longer just a family resemblance. Anna Lisa looks like one of those computerized images of kidnapped children, aged but not updated. Two round faces, one lined but still chubby-cheeked. Two showers of freckles. Two ready-for-the-big-softball game haircuts.

“Wow, you all look just alike!” Nora exclaims. “I didn't see it when you came in here, but wow. If you went to the same salon all the time, you'd be twins.”

Felix purses her lips and tastes her scar. She has an overwhelming urge to slather her hair with gel. Would it be rude to ask what sorts of styling products Nora has on hand? Anna Lisa makes her uneasy, looking back at Felix with Felix's face.
If we had the same salon,
Felix repeats in her head.

Anna Lisa, for her part, has a strange smile on her face.

It was not a heart attack. By the time Al learns this, she's home already, standing in the kitchen of the old farmhouse. Her mother has put up new curtains—printed with apples and corn and other things that don't grow in California—but everything else is the same. The smell of Lemon Pledge, the clay ashtrays Al and Suzy made in school.

“It's congestive heart failure,” Eudora Hill tells her daughters. “Which can cause heart attacks, but didn't, technically, in your father's case.”

Suzy has come home, too. She loves Los Angeles, is tan and nearly blonde, has befriended the students Aunt Randi teaches flute to at Pepperdine. The bored and panicked girl Al heard on the phone is gone; she's back to being a streak of forward motion. Al feels almost shy.

“Oh, thank God,” Suzy says.

“Yes, I think we should thank God,” agrees their mother. “Dr. Shannon says he still needs to take it easy until his body adapts to the medication and we figure out just how much work he can handle. We've hired a nice young man to help out at the store. Terry Kristalovich—he manages the office supply store across the street and helps out with restocking after he closes up shop for the day. You have to admire that sort of enterprise in a young person.”

Is it Anna Lisa's imagination, or is her mother looking at her pointedly? Eudora Hill has blue eyes that match the flowers on her CorningWare bowls. Neither of her daughters inherited them. She's taller than both girls too, sturdy despite her fragile housedress. Her nut-brown hair is marbled with more gray than Al remembered.

“I'm so anxious for Daddy to come home. Let's make him a big sign or something,” Suzy says. She bends down and pats Al's suitcase as if it were a dog. “Aw, the old suitcase. I remember. Looks like it's been through a lot, Anna Lisa.”

“It has,” Al says quietly. So far her mother and sister have done most of the talking. It's easier this way. Meg dropped Al off early this morning. Al kissed her on the cheek and said, “You'll wait for me, right?” She immediately hated herself for sounding so insecure. Eudora wanted to know why Al didn't invite her roommate in for coffee and cookies. She was cheerful, glad, apparently, that her mysterious daughter was not shacked up with some man.

Suzy had defended her: “Golly, Mother, Anna Lisa's worried about Daddy. She doesn't want to make small talk over cookies.” Al wondered what Suzy had guessed.

Now Eudora scoops up the suitcase and carries it upstairs, daughters trailing behind. Before Al can stop her, she has tossed it on Al's old bed, unclasped it and removed two neat stacks of folded clothing.

“Let's get you settled,” she says.

Then Eudora sees the men's shirts and slacks. Al could probably get away with wearing them one at a time, but they implicate her in the aggregate. Right now she's wearing a button-down shirt with the sandstone-colored skirt that Meg hemmed for her. It's a safe costume, but her bare calves make her feel more vulnerable than ever.

Her mother holds up a pair black pants, the ones she bought with Jody and Imogen. The cuffs are frayed now, but that's not what concerns Eudora. “Anna Lisa, I thought you worked as a secretary. Don't tell me this is what you wear to
work.”

“It's not,” Al says truthfully. She wears blue jeans and heavy tan boots. This is what she wears to Lilac's.

“Then what…?” Her mother's eyes beg her for a story.

She didn't really think she could come home without explaining anything, did she? Nevertheless, she's caught off guard.

“It gets cold in the mountains,” she explains. This is also true.

“But honey, these look like
men's
clothes. And it's 90 degrees here.”

Al feels every bit of the heat. Her cotton shirt is damp against her back and armpits. The bedroom where she slept every night for 19 years seems to have shrunk.

“I—” Al begins. What would happen if she told the truth? She looks at her mother for a clue. Eudora's face is pulled out of shape, like a wad of Silly Putty pressed against the comics page and stretched by her sick husband, her mysterious older daughter. Al remembers playing with Silly Putty as a kid, how the picture would snap in half if she pulled too fast, or collapse into a limp string if she pulled too hard.

“I work for this old man,” Al says a little too quickly. “His name is Luke Twentyman. He's a historian, and he's researching some of the old mines in the area, including this one where a girl died back at the turn of the century. Sometimes we have to go down in the mines. It's cold and slippery, and it would be dangerous to wear a skirt or high heels.”

Suzy's expression is intrigued but wary. Her green-gold eyes narrow. “You never told me that.”

“Well, she never told
me
anything at all,” Eudora says, taking a step closer to her younger daughter. Al pictures them staying up late, talking about her over tea. “A girl died there? Is it safe for you to be down there? Aren't mines always caving in?”

“We don't go that far,” Al assures her. “And Luke, well, he knows everything there is to know about the area.” She takes a breath, and inches toward neutral territory. “There are rumors that the girl's ghost still haunts the mines, though.”

“Yeah?” Suzy sits down on the bed, folding her legs neatly beneath her fern-print skirt. She settles in for a story.

Eudora puts down the black pants. “Ghosts—I hope you know better than that.” But she's listening, too. And so, in the middle of the sun-bleached room, Al tells them what she knows about Lilac Ambrose, and a few things she doesn't. She embroiders the story with eerie details from the safe, dead past, and silently thanks Lilac for saving her.

Gerald Hill has lost weight and gained wrinkles. But his hair and mustache maintain their color and wiry texture, and he plunges back into the store the minute he can, humming among the dried beans sandbagged around him like a fortress. Al and Suzy help out, punching orders into the cash register and tossing out blemished fruit. No one minds that Al wears slacks as long as she wears her maroon Hill Food & Supply apron, as if one balances the other. Summer crystallizes into autumn. Al's hips and belly begin to show the effects of her mother's oatmeal cookies. Her hair brushes her chin now and falls in front of her eyes.

“When are you coming home?” Meg wants to know. The connection is as bad as it usually is and her strong, deep voice is unnaturally quiet.

“They need me here at home,” Al protests. The two homes. Tonight she's on a pay phone on Fulton Street, the cold air nipping at her elbows.

“It's been two months,” Meg pleads. She is so far away.

Al's skin feels ready to crack open from the cold. Her warm insides will slither along the ground, then melt into it. “I know, I miss you something fierce.”

“I'm not Edith,” Meg says suddenly.

“What do you mean?”

“Before Shallan worked at the mill, she drove a truck for her uncle's company in Nevada City. She had to drive up over the mountains just to get to the place she was supposed to start driving from. Then she headed up into Oregon, back east as far as Ohio. Edith saw her once every two months, maybe. And she waited and waited. She was such a good little femme.” Meg's voice is tight, bordering on a hiss. “She stitched her a pillow, for God's sake.”

Al opens her mouth, but only a puff of steam comes out. A little ghost that hovers in front of her face and disappears.

“I'm not Edith,” Meg says.

Al goes to Hill Food & Supply the next morning puffy-eyed, her limbs big and clumsy. She stayed awake most of the night listening to the blood rushing past her ears. She has to get back to Lilac Mines.
Today I'll tell them,
she promises herself. Initially, she assured her family that her boss had granted her an unlimited leave of absence, and they bought it without question. Maybe she can say that Luke needs her help with a special research project. Will they buy that she has a unique skill of some sort? The burden of proof will undoubtedly be higher when explaining why she needs to leave than why she's able to stay.

She's glad to see Terry Kristalovich behind the counter when she enters the store, the bell dinging behind her. Usually, he comes in the evenings and Al nods at him as the guard changes. He's a skinny man who always wears pressed slacks and a tie.
Such a strong work ethic,
her mother says,
and handsome, too.
He has dark curly hair, and black stubble peeks from his pale chin when he arrives at the store each night.

But on this bright, cold morning, Terry's face is smooth. Al sees it for the first time, angular and almost feminine in its white translucence.

“Hello, Anna Lisa,” he says. He takes his time with her name, making in two separate words, as far from Al as one can get.

“Hi, Terry,” she croaks.

“Late night?” he asks, concerned, not teasing.

“I didn't sleep so well.”

“Oh, I thought maybe you were out on a date.”

“Oh, no.”

“Do you—if you're not too tired—do you want to give me a hand with this?” He holds up a flat cardboard box.

“Sure, what is it?” Al flings her house keys under the counter. She's wearing a light yellow blouse with a round Peter Pan collar, but she will not carry a purse.

“It's the new promotion from Miller Brewing Company.” He slides a box cutter along the edge of the box with expert grace and extracts a pair of cardboard legs. They are nearly bare, except for a sliver of red skirt at the top and a pair of tall black pumps at the bottom. Two round white thighs above muscular calves. With a pang, Al thinks that they look like Meg. Half of Meg.

Terry reaches into the box and pulls out the top half of the woman, who (to Al's relief and disappointment) looks nothing like Meg. She is yellow-haired, smiling too big, holding a glistening mug as if it's an exotic but dangerous animal. The way Johnny Carson holds beady-eyed falcons.

Terry blushes. “Do you think it's too risqué? I wouldn't want to upset your father. I ordered it out of the catalog, but, well, it didn't say her dress would be so short.”

“My father won't mind. Anything that will bring more customers. But I don't know about my mother. She thinks girls today get themselves in trouble.”

“Maybe we shouldn't put it up then. It's her store, too.”

“No,” Al says. She's not sure what she thinks—whether girls get themselves in trouble or trouble finds girls, whether she likes the legs or hates the beer girl's phony smile—but she knows she wants to erect the flat statue. “The store could use a boost. My mother will understand, eventually.”

Terry holds the halves together while Anna Lisa fumbles with the cardboard tabs. She secures the girl with masking tape. Terry watches her over his arching nose. He smells like erasers.

“What about your office supply store?” Al asks. “Who's running it?”

“Nancy-Jane Sammartino, my shop girl. I try to be there as much as I can, but there was so much to do
here
this…”

“Nancy-Jane?” Al interrupts. “Nancy-Jane Keeler? I went to high school with her. If she married… ”

“Walter Sammartino,” Terry finishes. “That's her husband.”

“Wally, right.” Al doesn't know why this should feel like a betrayal. She knows most of the girls from school are married by now. She only had one class with Nancy-Jane. But she's one more person who has led a real life while Al was off in the mountains, accumulating nothing that she can utter a word of.

“They're a great couple, really nice people,” Terry says wholeheartedly. He positions the Miller girl in the window, so that they can only see her brown silhouette. It's as if she's walking away from them, off toward Oktoberfest. “Hey, I know! We should all have dinner. Since you know them.”

“Well, not really. Just barely… ”

“They invite me over quite frequently. Sometimes I go, but, you know, I always imagine I'm imposing a little, a lonely bachelor in need of a home-cooked meal. But this way it would be more like—a gathering of friends.”

Al changes the subject. “Why do you work so hard? If you don't mind my asking. I mean, those are long hours. Your store and then our store.”

“Planning for the future,” Terry says, smoothing his paisley tie. For a moment he looks like a bright young politician; then he slumps a little. “I hope I'll have a wife one day, children, all those things that everyone wants. But they're not easy—not for everybody.”

Al holds her breath. What does he know? What does he feel?

“When I was a baby, during the Depression, my mother used to bathe me in the sink with soap chips she'd saved,” he says. “She said I chased them all around, tried to eat them like they were candy. She said, 'You loved order. You loved things to be clean even back then.' Of course, I don't remember it. Parents always save that one symbolic story about you.”

Al wonders what story her parents would tell about her, whether it would giver her a clue as to who she's supposed to be now.

“She said I'd have to work extra hard. That, being Jewish, people would try to find things to hold against me. I don't know if that's completely true—maybe things were harder for her when she came over from Russia—but I do work hard. Just in case. And that's why I admire your father, Anna Lisa. He works so hard, and keeps things orderly. Look around, you can see how much pride he takes in this store.” Terry pauses. “I'm sure I don't have to tell
you
that.”

Gerald Hill has always been inseparable from the store: Daddy weeding green beans, Daddy mopping up broken eggs, Daddy calling gentle instructions to the man backing his truck of frozen dinners up to the rear door. It's been strange seeing him pad around the house in slippers. Al looks around. She tries to see the store the way a stranger might, not broken down into details. It's small but thorough, with a one-door freezer case, a colorful produce section, aisles of dried and canned goods, an aisle of what Al supposes are the “supplies”: pencils, rubber balls, aspirin, instant coffee, sanitary napkins. The selection has grown over the years. Al remembers when her father installed the freezer case. It was the first time she heard swear words. The walls are clean and cream-colored. The store sponsors its share of Little League teams, but Gerald doesn't put their pictures up. He says it's bragging, it's clutter. A wooden ceiling fan ensures that there is always a gentle, rhythmic breeze blowing.