The Diamond Lane (16 page)

The blood boomed in her eyes as she rammed her cart through the aisles, crowded with hip young neo-fifties wives and their petulant children. She remembered when Rancher Bob's had sold natural food in bulk straight from the box it was shipped in, reminding Mimi fondly of her hippie days. But Rancher Bob's had become chic. There was valet parking now. Charge accounts. Catering. An entire aisle dedicated to Condiments from the Seven Continents. The wives of overpaid, undertalented television executives, insensitive to the fact that some single, childless shopper on a time schedule might actually want to pass, clogged the aisles, babbling about good pediatricians and pre-prep school day care. Mimi loathed the entire scene. Even though she had recently dared to take out a loan for a tiny eye tuck – office procedure, low risk, guaranteed to lob off ten years – she still had her principles.

I'm a hard-as-nails working girl, she thought, jauntily tossing a roll of cheap paper towels into her cart. An actress-writer struggling to make ends meet, generous even though I've got nothing, sadly in love with a married, misunderstood genius. Mouse should make a movie about
me
.

As she dropped a bag of pistachios into the cart she caught a glance of the price on the cans of poppyseed filling. Three dollars and thirty-five cents!

She scrunched her hair angrily. She couldn't afford it. She could go ask Mouse – forget it, Mouse already thought she was a flake. She was not above floating a check, but Rancher Bob's had recently installed a system whereby, at the checkout counter, the checker slid your bank card into a small box resembling a time clock next to the cash register, which provided a digital reading of your checking account balance. To her knowledge her balance was currently somewhere in the high single figure. She could put back everything but the poppyseed filling, or…

Her purse yawned innocently in the kiddie seat of the shopping cart. The cans would fit snugly between her makeup bag and her Week-at-a-Glance.

No. She did not do that anymore. Lifting a Jimi Hendrix album at thirteen was one thing. It was rebellious, daring. Lifting poppyseed filling at thirty-six was neurotic and desperate. Mouse would never do anything so base. Mouse didn't even make poppyseed lemon cake. It did smack a bit of Shirl and Tupper-ware, Mimi reflected as she dutifully retraced her steps. Suddenly she was infused with a sense of purpose.

This would be her last lemon poppyseed cake, her last married boyfriend, her last dumb job, her last day of vomiting. Back went the pistachios, the jicama, the Ethiopian Swiss Water-Processed Decaf. As she trundled up to the checkout counter she dug for her checkbook, feeling proud, adult, in control.

She would definitely rethink her thing with Ralph. He was married, and egotistical, and not even very attractive. There was Someone out there for her. She would go back to her yoga class. She would call Bob Hope and see if he had anything going. She would eat more tofu.

Then, she looked down at her checkbook. The austere white pad of deposit slips stared back at her. No checks! She had forgotten to put more in, and, it turned out, she had no cash.

She yanked her cart out of line, tears flooding her eyes.

“–
AND THEN
– you're not gonna believe this, Mom!” yelped Mimi, bouncing on the edge of her chair.

It was nearly midnight. Mouse and Tony, Mimi and Shirl sat in the living room of the house on Cantaloupe Avenue having coffee and Mimi's famous lemon poppyseed cake. Auntie Barb, Shirl's sister, an antisocial clean freak from Boring, Oregon, who had come to take care of Shirl after the accident, was mopping the kitchen floor. All the windows were wide open in support of Shirl's stubborn belief that Southern California weather was temperate and subtropical all year long. The night was sopping with fog. Between bites, Mouse's teeth chattered.

“– the unbelievable thing is our Mousie Mouse getting married. We're so pleased.” Shirl dimpled at Tony, perched on the other end of the sofa. He raised his blond eyebrows in acknowledgment, his ruddy checks full of cake.

The white helmet of bandages Shirl had worn in the hospital had since been removed. Because Tony, i.e., a Man, had come to dinner, she'd gotten dolled up. She wore rouge, and an aqua blue turban, a get-well present from Mimi. Normally she went without, wandering around the house scratching at the rusty eye of a scab, getting her nubby scalp sunburned sitting by the pool reading her decorating books and bridal magazines.

This new lack of vanity worried Mimi and Mouse. Also, the glazed doughnuts. All her life Shirl had been a starch person. She lived for pasta and bread. They had never had desserts growing up. Shirl didn't know the first thing about making chocolate chip cookies, except from the prefab logs of dough from the grocery store. Then, the accident, and suddenly she was transformed into a sugarholic. Glazed doughnuts for lunch, cookies for dinner. Sometimes Auntie Barb caught her in the kitchen in the middle of the night licking tablespoons of canned chocolate frosting and peanut butter mixed together. Dr. Klingston had warned them there might be a personality change, due to the damage to the temporal lobe. Mouse thought it was more likely that during the operation Dr. Klingston accidentally nicked the
all-important wad of gray matter that governed her mother's sense of taste. Shirl gobbled down her fourth piece of poppyseed cake as though it were her first, poppyseeds dotting the corners of her mouth.

“Two seconds after he says he's not going to report me, he asks if I want to go get a cup of coffee!” said Mimi.

“He asked you out?” said Shirl. “He didn't ask you out. Now wait, honey, you go too fast. This boy who caught you
shoplifting
, this box boy –”

“– assistant manager, Mom. He's an actor anyway –”

“When that Mimi sets her cap for a fella, look out!”

“I can't believe you shoplifted,” said Mouse.

“It was really a riot,” said Mimi. “It was just this one time, anyway. I forgot my checks –”

“– uh-huh. First poppyseed paste, next convenience stores,” said Mouse.

“– filling, poppyseed
filling
–”

“Now I'm confused. I thought you said this boy worked at Rancher Bob's –”

“– he
does
work there, Mom.”

“He's the assistant manager,” said Mouse.

“But he's really, you know, an actor.”

“Like twenty-seven thousand other people in Los Angeles,” said Mouse.

“More than that,” said Mimi. “He just does the Rancher Bob thing to pay the rent. Like I work for Solly.”

“What did you say his name was?” asked Shirl.

“Cliff Lyonswood. He's been on a bunch of soaps.”

“On
As the World Turns
,” said Mouse.

“Not that dumb show,” said Mimi, “
Days of Our Lives
. Anyway, he said those cans of filling were ancient, so I was saving him having to take them off the shelf.”

“Very comforting. I survive sixteen years in Africa only to die of ptomaine in L.A.”

“Cliff Lyonswood.” Shirl tasted the name. “That sounds
made-up. Bad policy to go out with someone with a made-up name.”

“They're not going out,” said Mouse.

“I just said he asked me out,” said Mimi. “He's not my type.”

“That never stopped you before,” said Shirl.

Mouse froze for a split instant, her fork between her lips. Ivan hadn't been Mimi's type either. Mimi's gaze clicked from Tony and Shirl, to her mug of lukewarm coffee.

“Well, anyway,” said Mimi lamely.

Mouse fell silent. She licked her ring finger, then poked up the leftover poppyseeds on her plate.

All evening Mimi had been as twittery as she'd been at sixteen, her messy-on-purpose hair flung up at a more gravity-defying angle than usual. She wore a limp black tank top, blue jeans tight enough to bruise her kidneys, scuffed red cowboy boots. She scuttled around Shirl's newly remodeled kitchen, constructing elaborate dishes with exotic ingredients that required every bowl and appliance in the place, worked up a sweat, drank too much wine, told windy anecdotes for the benefit of Shirl and Tony, sitting cozily at the kitchen table watching her. They didn't eat until ten o'clock. By then Mouse was so hungry that black and white pinwheels twirled on the insides of her eyelids every time she blinked.

“– really a pill, this client, Janice. She kept calling for Solly, and I mean calling!” Mimi gestured in the air with a whisk festooned with egg whites. “I mean six and seven times a day she'd call. Solly was waiting to hear on her deal from Fox and he had nothing to say to her. So I kept asking him if he wanted to take the call and he said, ‘Tell her I'm in a meeting, tell her I'm at lunch.' All these excuses. And I tell her, and she starts getting pissed at me. She says, ‘I know he's there, Mimi.' She accuses me of not giving him his messages. Finally, one morning, Janice calls, and I don't even ask Solly if he wants to take it, because I know he hasn't heard from Fox, so I say, ‘He's at lunch.' Only problem is, it's ten o'clock in the morning. Janice goes, ‘I can't believe this.
Put Solly on the phone right now,' and I go, ‘He doesn't want to talk to you, Janice,' and she goes, ‘Mimi, who did you fuck to get this job,' and I go – it just pops out of my mouth, I don't even know what I'm saying – ‘I fucked you, Janice.'”

“Margaret FitzHenry,” said Shirl, pursing her lips to keep from smiling. Tony hucked and hawed politely. A beat of silence while Mimi folded the egg whites into her soufflé, waiting for them to ask her what happened next.

Mouse had anticipated an interminable evening of strained pleasantries, forgetting that wasn't how it worked on Cantaloupe Avenue. Instead, Shirl had ushered Tony straight to the kitchen, where she complimented him on his lankiness, then plied him with a plate of deviled eggs she'd made up especially for him. Fitzy, her late husband and Mouse's father, had
loved
deviled eggs, she'd said. Especially with paprika. Shirl hoped he wasn't scared off by paprika.

She grilled Tony about his background and about his and Mouse's life in Africa. It did not escape Mouse that until tonight Shirl demonstrated no interest in Africa whatsoever. Tony, one long leg slung over the other, fingers laced over his lap, guzzled steady refills of gin and tonics, courtesy of Auntie Barb. He looked as if he already had a regular place at the dinner table, his own toothbrush hanging in the bathroom.

Mouse, exhausted from running errands all day, leaned in the doorway, clutching her brown elbows, smiling and nodding politely, as per instructions from The Pink Fiend.
They love you so much
.

“We were working for rival production companies –” began Tony, on the saga of how he and Mouse fell in love.

“– s'cuse me, I've got to go put on the love theme from
Romeo and Juliet
,” said Mouse. Tony wasn't really going to start on
that!
She darted out of the kitchen with the ready excuse that she had to go to the bathroom.

“That's right, run off, just like you ran off to Africa!” called Shirl, lassoing her back into the room.

“I didn't run off to Africa.”

“Go, go. God forbid we should keep you from doing whatever it is you need to do.”

“I was going to the bathroom.” Mouse hung in the doorway.

“She thinks I exaggerate,” said Tony. “The story embarrasses her.”

“She's blushing,” said Mimi. “Isn't that sweet?”

“Well, don't keep us in suspense,” said Shirl, pushing the plate of deviled eggs under his nose, her eyes glinting beneath the aqua turban. “Sit, Mousie, sit. You make me nervous.”

Obediently, and against her better judgment, Mouse sat.

“About four years ago, my Uncle Nigel was producing nature shows for the BBC in Nairobi.”

“
Pro
-ducing, I love that. Just like on that
Mantelpiece Theater
–”

“
Master
piece, Mom,” said Mimi.

“– go on, go on –”

“I'd been bumming round Africa, when Uncle Ni offered me a position on a documentary they were shooting in southern Kenya, around Maasai Mara, the Game Reserve, as a sound recordist.”

“It's really a gorgeous place. Solly has a client who wrote a script about going on safari there.”

“Mimi, shush.”

“The film had as its subject elephant poaching – you know, killing elephants illegally for their tusks. The first day out we were set to interview some poachers at their hideout in the bush. They were ex-soldiers armed with assault weapons. They would just as soon shoot you dead as have a chat. In order to interview them Uncle Ni had to bribe them, then promise not to disclose their whereabouts, et cetera, et cetera. Quite an elaborate arrangement. In any event, we got out there, and a minute or so into the interview they decided they'd had quite enough of us. They forced the cameraman to turn off the camera – this was at
gunpoint – but they'd somehow forgotten about me, the sound recordist. I allowed the tape to roll –”

“– honey, you could have been killed!”