The Apothecary (2 page)
In school, at Hollywood High, we watched a safety film in which a cheerful cartoon turtle named Bert explained that when a nuclear bomb came, we should get under our desks and put our heads between our knees. It had a little song that went like this:
There was a turtle by the name of Bert
And Bert the turtle was very alert
When danger threatened him, he never got hurt
He knew just what to do!
He’d duck—and cover
Duck—and cover!
He did what we all must learn to do
You—and you—and you—and you—
Duck—and cover!
Our teacher, Miss Stevens, who had been born deep in the last century and wore her white hair coiled up like a ghost’s pastry on the back of her head, would lead us in a bomb drill. “Here goes the flash,” she’d say. “Everyone under the desks!” And under we’d go—as if our wooden school desks full of books and pencils were going to protect us from an atomic bomb.
The important thing, the films emphasised, was not to panic. So instead, everyone maintained a constant low-grade anxiety. I was only in the ninth grade and I might have managed to shrug off the worry, except that I’d started to think that someone was watching me.
At first, it was just a feeling. I’d get it walking home: that weird sensation that comes when someone’s eyes are on you. It was February in Los Angeles, and it was brisk and cool but not cold. The tall palm trees by the school steps were as green as ever.
On the way home I practised walking like Katharine Hepburn, striding along with my shoulders back. I wore trousers whenever I could, and my favourites were bright green sailor pants, with four big buttons and flared legs. They were worthy of Hepburn as the cuffs swished along. She was my favourite movie star, and I thought if I could walk like her, then I could feel and
be
like her, so sure and confident, tossing her head and snapping out a witty retort. But I didn’t want anyone to see me practising my Hepburn walk, so at first the sensation of being watched only made me embarrassed. When I looked over my shoulder and saw nothing but the ordinary traffic on Highland Avenue, I hugged my books, rounded my shoulders, and walked home like an ordinary fourteen-year-old girl.
Then there was a day when I had the watched feeling, and looked back and saw a black sedan cruising more slowly than the rest of the traffic. I could have sworn it was driving at exactly the speed I was walking. I sped up, thinking that Kate Hepburn wouldn’t be afraid, and the car seemed to speed up, too. Panic rose in my chest. I turned down an alley, and the car didn’t follow, so I hurried along the side of the buildings, past the rubbish bins. When I got onto Selma Avenue, which was quiet and tree-lined, there was a man outside a house pruning his roses, but no cars.
My heart was pounding and I made myself breathe slowly. I nodded to the man with the roses and kept walking down Selma. I told myself it was silly to be afraid: No one was following me. They had no reason to follow me. I tossed my hair, wishing it would move in one glossy, curvy mass, and then the black sedan came around the corner ahead and cruised slowly towards me. I felt a cold flush, as if ice water had been pumped through my veins.
I looked back to the rose man, but he had gone inside his house. I gripped my books to keep my hands from shaking, and I kept walking as the black car drove towards me, ridiculously slowly. As it passed, I kept my chin very high and slid a glance sideways. In the car were two men in dark suits. The one closest to me, in the passenger seat, had hair so short he looked like a soldier, and he was watching me. There were two dark, brimmed hats on the backseat. I didn’t know any man who wore a hat.
I kept walking, and the black car stopped and idled at the kerb. I turned on Vista, my own street, and when I thought I was out of sight, I ran for the house, fumbling for my key. My parents were at work and wouldn’t be home yet. I dropped the key and picked it up off the sidewalk as the black sedan turned onto Vista, and then I got inside and slammed the door and slid the chain.
“Hello?” I called to the empty house, just in case. No one answered.
I dropped my books and ran to the back door, which led out to the patio, and I made sure the door was locked. Sometimes we were careless about that door because it led to the hedged-in garden, not to the street, but the bolt was thrown, so the house had been locked all day. I looked out the front window and saw the sedan parked by the kerb at the end of the block, waiting. I closed the curtains and turned on the lights in the kitchen, my hands still shaking. The kitchen was the room where I felt safest, because it was where I sat every night with my parents, doing homework while they cooked, listening to them talk.
I told myself it was fine, it was probably in my mind. It was my imagination taking over. I made myself a peanut butter and honey sandwich and started doing my algebra homework. Each problem was like a puzzle, and it helped take my mind off the men who might or might not be sitting in their black car on the corner of our street, behind the curtains I was determined not to open.
At six o’clock, I was deep in a hunt for the value of
x
when I heard the door open and hit the end of the chain hard. My heart started to race again. I’d managed to pretend that the men weren’t really after me, but here they were, breaking in.
“What
is
this?” a man’s angry voice said.
Then I realised the voice was more annoyed than angry, and then I realised it was my father’s. “Janie?” he called, more alarmed now than annoyed. “Are you here? What’s going on?”
We walked that night to Musso and Frank’s, which was my favourite restaurant, but it didn’t feel like a treat. My parents tried to pretend everything was just fine, but we took back alleys, and they watched the corners at every street. My father walked so fast that my mother and I had to walk double-time just to keep up.
We took a booth, and I ordered the thin pancakes called flannel cakes for dinner. I wanted my parents to object and make me order chicken and vegetables—I wanted things to be normal—but they didn’t even notice.
“So who
are
those men in the car?” I asked.
My mother sighed. “They’re US marshals,” she said. “From Washington. The government.”
That didn’t make any sense. “What do they want?”
“We’ve been wanting to tell you, Janie,” she said. She always got right to the point, but now she was dancing around whatever she was trying to say. “We have news, and we think it’s good news. We’re—well, we’re thinking we’ll all move to London.”
I stared at her.
“It will be an adventure,” she said.
I looked at my father. “What did you do?” I asked.
“Nothing!” he said, too loudly. A woman at another table looked at us.
“Davis,” my mother said.
“But I
haven’t
done anything! This is all so ridiculous!”
A waiter brought water glasses to the table, and my mother smiled up at him. When he was gone, she said, “I don’t know if you remember Katie Lardner.”
“Only from birthday parties,” I said, slumped in the booth. I was being what my mother called
a real pill
, and I knew it, but I didn’t want to move to London. I liked my friends, and I liked my school. I liked junior lifesaving at the beach, and trips to Santa Barbara, and oranges growing in the front yard. I liked everything except being followed by men from Washington for whatever my parents had done.
“The Lardners moved to Mexico,” my mother said, “because her father became a target. It became impossible for him to work here.”
“No,” I said. “They moved because her father was a Communist.” Then the floor of Musso and Frank’s seemed to open beneath me. “Oh,
no
! Are you
Communists
?”
Both my parents glanced around to see if anyone was listening. Then my father leaned forward and spoke in a low voice that wouldn’t carry.
“We believe in the Constitution, Janie,” he said. “And we’ve been put on a list of people they’re watching. That’s why they’re watching you, when it has nothing to do with you. And I will not have them following my
child
.” He thumped the table, and his voice had started to rise again.
“Davis,” my mother said.
“I won’t, Marjorie,” he said.
“I don’t even understand what Communism
is
,” I said.
My father sighed. “The idea,” he said, in his low voice, “is that people should share resources, and own everything communally, so there aren’t wildly rich people who have everything and desperately poor people who have nothing. That’s the idea. It’s just hard to get it to work. The trouble right now is that the US government—or at least something called the House Committee on Un-American Activities—has gotten so paranoid about the
idea
, as if it’s a contagious disease, that they’re going after innocent people who may hold the idea, or have held it in the past. It isn’t fair, or rational, or constitutional.”
I was determined not to cry, and wiped my nose with my napkin. “Can I at least finish the semester here?”
He sighed. “Those men want to make us appear in court, under oath,” he said. “We could answer for ourselves, but they would ask us to testify about our friends, and we can’t do that. We’ve heard they’ll confiscate passports soon so people can’t leave the country. So we have to go right away.”
“When?”
“This week.”
“This
week
?”
My mother broke in. “There’s someone we’ve worked with before,” she said. “Olivia Wolff. She already moved to London, to produce a television show about Robin Hood. She wants us to work on it, which is—Janie, it’s an amazing opportunity. It’ll be like living in a Jane Austen novel.”
“You mean I’ll get married at the end?” I asked. “I’m fourteen.”
“Janie.”
“And Jane Austen was
from
there, she wasn’t American. I’ll be so out of place!”
“Janie, please,” my mother said. “This is a great chance that Olivia’s giving us. We don’t have a choice.”
“
I
don’t have a choice.
You
had a choice, and you got on that list!”
“We didn’t choose to be on the list,” my father said.
“So how’d you get on it?”
“By believing in freedom of speech. By having faith in the First Amendment!”
The waiter came and slid our plates in front of us. “Flannel cakes for the little lady,” he said.
I gave him a weak smile.
My father stared at my stack of pancakes, with the pat of real butter melting on top. “That’s what you ordered for
dinner
?”
“She can have whatever she wants,” my mother said.
I glared at my father in defiance, but when I took a forkful of my last thin, golden, delicious Musso and Frank’s flannel cakes for a long time—maybe forever—they tasted like sawdust, and I made a face. My father couldn’t resist the joke.
“You look like you’re eating real flannel,” he said, smiling. “Pyjamas with syrup.”
“Very funny,” I said.
“Look, kiddo,” he said. “If we can’t laugh together, we’re not going to make it through this thing.”
I swallowed the sawdust. “Don’t call me kiddo,” I said.
I
t’s safe to say I was not graceful about the move to London. I was no witty, patient, adaptable Jane Austen. And if I was anything like Katharine Hepburn, it was in the scenes where she’s being a giant pest. I cried in the taxi all the way to the airport, past the churning oil rigs on La Cienega. I cried on the first aeroplane I’d ever been on, which should have been exciting, and
was
exciting—all those tiny buildings below—but I wasn’t going to give my parents the satisfaction of knowing that I was enjoying it.
At Heathrow Airport in London, there was a framed picture of the brand-new Queen Elizabeth II on the wall.
“She’s not that much older than you are,” my mother said. “And she’s been through a war, and her father’s dead, and now she has to be queen, poor thing.”
“See?” my father said. “Your life could be worse.”
I looked at the picture of the young queen. We had escaped ahead of the US marshals, locking up the house and packing only the things we could carry. My parents were going to be writing for the BBC under fake names—
fake names
, when my mother wouldn’t even put yellow food colouring in margarine! We were living like criminals or spies. Although I was angry, standing there looking at the plucky young queen’s portrait, I allowed myself to think that my mother was right, and it might be an adventure.