Taking It (5 page)

“You didn't really try to steal anything, did you?” he asked.

I shut up.

He struggled to get out of the chair, and then gave up. He just sat there, looking at the ceiling. “God help me,” he said.

I just sat there.

“I can't take it,” he said. “I've done all I can. You people are going to tear me apart, one little piece at a time.”

He didn't mean
you people
. He meant
you women
.

He meant his clients, his paralegals, his contacts in the media, everybody.

“You're not going to do this to me,” he said.

And then I began to talk.

Sometimes my father really listens. It isn't often, but it happens. The two of us have a planet to ourselves.

9

I kept my voice steady. It only took a few minutes. I think I even took a small, bitter pleasure in it. “I pretend I'm stealing things,” I said.

I could feel him listening, feel him not wanting to.

My words were a new third person in the room, an intruder. Maybe I had expected him to deny the possibility, insist that it wasn't true.

I said, “I made myself quit.”

“Until today,” he said. He was out of the chair, beginning to pace the room the way I had expected him to.

I didn't respond.

“You pretend,” he said, a half question.

I hate it when my voice comes out sounding like someone who hasn't spoken in ten thousand years. I whispered, “That's right.”

“Except today. Today you weren't pretending.” My father got the point too quickly. He couldn't keep from sounding like a lawyer lancing a star witness.

I felt myself going dry inside. “What happened to your client?” I asked.

My question didn't even seem to make sense to him. But then he turned to look at me and he said, “He disappeared.”

“The child molester?”

My dad inclined his head a little, not wanting to acknowledge the possible guilt of one of his wealthy clients, and maybe not wanting to discuss child molesters with me in any detail.

“He ran away?” I said.

“The trial begins tomorrow. His wife doesn't know anything. His friends all know nothing. I go to his house, a big place, up in the hills, nice view. The guy's gone.”

“Maybe he'll be back.”

“I know the signs.”

“You can't tell what someone else is doing.”

He let himself look at me. “True.”

My feelings kept me quiet for a moment.

My dad knows how to keep talking while things settle down emotionally. “He left with snapshots of his wife, his mom and dad. He took funny little things, his grandfather's cuff links, odd keepsakes you want with you when you're never coming back.”

He was not pacing, he was just standing, looking at the fish in the aquarium.

There is a loach who lives at the bottom of the fish tank and feeds on the moss that grows on the sand. He never asked
how is the tang, how is the parrot fish
. It was always:
How is the coolie loach doing?
It was a little fish that was colorless and thoughtful-looking, one of those students who study hard and barely pass. I think he liked it because you had to think before you could see it, figure out where it might be.

“I called you,” he said. “I left four or five messages.”

I said, “I think Mother left some messages, too.”

This stopped him for a second. “Saying what?”

“I didn't listen to them. I just heard her voice saying something over the machine. I didn't play the messages back. She was tense, the way she gets.”

I wanted my father to say
I know the way she gets
, a continuing minor conspiracy against her, but he said nothing.

I said, in my talking-fossil voice, “She wanted to know where I was.”

He was looking at me so intently I had to look away from him. “There's something else happening here,” he said. “Something you're not telling me.”

I kept quiet. The aquarium gurgled. Sometimes it sounds pretty, calming. Right now I wanted to dump all the water out all over the floor.

“Is everything okay between you and Stu?”

“I haven't seen him in a couple of weeks.”

“Is that what's bothering you?”

You don't have to answer every question. If you don't feel like talking, you can shut up.

“I'm going to tell your mother,” he said. “I can't handle this. It's humiliating, but it's the truth.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “I'm calling her now. I'm going to ask her to come over.” She lived near Lake Merritt, although she was getting ready to move. She could be here in twenty minutes.

What a mess it would make, water everywhere, fish flopping on the carpet. “Not tonight,” I said, my voice sounding awful.

“It's something we have to take care of,” he said.

I got up and took his hand. My hand was pale and slender, and his hand was weathered, broad, flat. I wanted to tell him not to call Mother, not now.

He withdrew his hand. He picked up the phone on the piano. One of his shoes knocked lightly against the piano leg, and there was a faint reverberation, a piano string coming briefly to life.

I went into the hall bathroom. Every time the light is switched on a fan starts up. You can't hear anything but an airy whine from the ceiling. The light there wasn't any good, one of the bulbs stuttering. It made shadows jump up and down on my face as I washed myself and shook my head so my hair fell back into place. I wondered where Ted got electricity, all the way out on the desert.

Ted had said I could come and see him, marvel at the sun and the sand, or some other half-bookish, half-joking Ted phrase like that, the complicated directions written on a postcard.

I joined my father again. He was off the phone. Whatever he had said, it had taken very little time.

“But how would you do that?” I said, standing next to my father, both of us looking into the aquarium.

“Do what?” asked my dad, half-lost in his own thoughts.

“Disappear,” I said.

“Don't use credit cards,” he said, not paying much attention. “Use only cash. And don't get any speeding tickets.” Then he stopped himself, looking at me, thinking about what he had just said.

10

I was surprised, and slumped against the fridge.

I had expected my mother, but not Adler, too. When I heard his voice, I wanted to slip out the back door and never come back.

It was late, after ten, and I was starving, except I knew I wouldn't be able to eat. I tore the endpaper off a new roll of Turns. I leaned against the refrigerator, trying to hear what they were saying.

She didn't want to see me, either. You could hear it in the house, the way the two men had audible voices but my mother's voice was quiet. You couldn't hear her when she spoke, but you knew she was talking by the silence of the other voices.

They talked for a long time. I boiled some water and added some spaghetti, and when the spaghetti was done I poured it out into the colander in the sink. I like the way the steam feels in my face and the way the kitchen windows get fogged for a minute or two, although the steam makes my hair stick out funny.

I opened the back door to let some of the steam out and I thought: Escape.

Go ahead and run.

At the cooking class at Redwood School I always thought it was fun to make cocoa from scratch, a little brown powder with that wonderful smell, a little NutraSweet, stirring all the time while you add the hot milk. Maybe that would be a good plan later on, I thought, cocoa for everybody.

But then she was there in the kitchen doorway.

She stood with her arms crossed. She was wearing black pumps that made her look too tall, her hair frosted with gold highlights, and some kind of new color around her eyes, professionally done.

She didn't smile, she didn't not-smile, she just looked. “I spent a long afternoon at Nordstrom's.” Then she added, “Your father explained what happened.”

God knows, I thought, what mangled version of events he managed to tell. I suppose I made some kind of sign that I heard her.

“I'm not the confused person I used to be,” she said. “I know how to share my life, Anna. If you let me.”

“I'm sorry about today,” I said.

My voice was quiet, and Mother had to turn her head to hear me.

“We've been doing better recently, you and I,” she said.

“I was looking forward to shopping with you,” I said. I had more to say, a little, truthful speech, but I couldn't go on.

She and I had fought terribly when I was fourteen, and my father had suggested keeping me here, close to my school. She didn't know my daily habits anymore, what I liked to wear, what kind of cereal I liked in the morning, but little by little we had been spending more time together.

She left the kitchen doorway. I thought for a moment she was going to walk in, give me a hug, give the steaming pasta a toss, but instead she turned and left me alone in the brightly lit room.

Staging is everything with her. She was letting me make my entrance. She had started out as an assistant director, making sure guests in the control room stayed quiet when the director was working, changing from camera one to the floor shot on camera four.

She had machine-gunned her way to the top, and now she fired sportscasters and had the parking-lot fence topped with coiled barbed wire. Channel Two News had gotten three awards in the last year.

I didn't want to look his way, but I did. Adler was on the blue leather sofa, his gray eyes making him look like someone who would understand anything I would ever do. He wore a dark wool sports jacket, Italian cut, with a navy blue tie, and sometimes when other people were talking he would put his hand on the knot of his tie. Adler moves slowly and likes to touch things, make sure they are still there.

Dad sat there with his hands cupped like someone praying, except he wasn't praying. He was looking at his ex-wife's back, or maybe even her butt, but it wasn't a sexy look.

“There have to be some changes,” said Mother. She had been in therapy for three years with a woman and had gone to self-help seminars, where she had met Adler.

“I made some pasta,” I said.

“We are going to help you,” she said, with her smile, arms crossed, fingers clenching the sleeves of her red suit jacket. Sometimes Mom wears too much makeup. When you do that, your face looks good, but your hands look old.

“I don't want to talk about it,” I said. When in doubt ask for a continuance. “I made plenty of spaghetti, the imported kind.”

Then she really surprised me. She cried. Not much, but there was a definite wetness in her eyes. Mother didn't cry very often. I saw at that moment how much Adler had helped her. I saw how lucky she was.

“You want my attention,” she said, walking away. She didn't look in my direction when she added, “You need me.”

Mother was doing this partly because she had an audience, but partly because she meant it. Adler looked at me and gave me one of his smiles, a wise man who never failed to marvel at people like my mother. He was a psychologist, and he had been in Vietnam, Mother told me once, and had seen terrible things.

The wedding had been a month before, quick: flowers, an overweight photographer. After months of talking it had happened, and I had been there. Maureen had come down to Carmel, too, telling me her shoes were killing her about nine hundred times. I hadn't held flowers or anything like that. I had worn an uncomfortable robin's-egg blue satin, a dress that sounded like fir trees in the wind every time I moved, not a good thing if you're not a fir tree.

“We'll be back in a week,” she said. “When we come back, we want you to move in with us in our new house in San Francisco.”

Dad looked at me, looked at Adler, looked at the floor, his eyes always moving. His silence made it clear:
We
included him.

My brain made me not understand for a moment.

“For the rest of the summer,” said Adler, the first time he had spoken, the sound of his voice causing my mother to turn and look at him. “It's a nice, big house. You can see the sailboats.”

Dad saw the look in my eyes. He said, “I really can't help you anymore.” My father looked at the wall, looked at his hands.

We had been in family counseling at Kaiser for a few months when Mother moved out. Dad had said at the time that Mother was afraid of her own adulthood.

Mother turned her head, thinking I had said something. A cherry bomb had blown up near her left ear when she was eight years old. I realized for the millionth time that she was too proud to wear a hearing aid in her dead ear. I wanted to protect her from danger, from me.

Sometimes when I was little, we took naps together. I would wake up first and lie next to her listening to her breathing. Sometimes her feet would twitch, and I thought: She's having a dream. She's running in the dream.

Adler gave me one of his looks, his peaceful eyes, which had seen men die.

Everyone said they had already eaten. My dad and I would have enough spaghetti to feed Eastern Europe.

I stood in the darkness while my mother got into her Saab. Adler opened the passenger door, the inside of the car instantly full of light. “Don't be so anxious, Anna.” I couldn't see his face, only his hand holding out some offering he could not make in words. “We all want to help you.”

I thought for a moment he wanted me to take his hand. And I almost did. I took a step toward him across the dark grass.

But I stopped myself and said something ordinary, wishing them a good trip. It was like hearing someone else talk, a voice on a radio.

They left, and I turned to see my father holding open the front door, a black cutout figure.

11

Swimming underwater there is nothing left of the world, and every human voice is filtered. There is only the body, breasts and knees brushing the bottom of the pool, and the feeling that life is burning away in the lungs. I love it, but Stu is right—I should run more.