Windfalls: A Novel (32 page)

B
Y THE TIME A PLACE OPENED UP FOR HER AT THE
R
EDWOOD
W
OMEN’S
Shelter where Barbara was staying, the final scraps of scab had sloughed off Cerise’s palms. The skin beneath was shiny and pink and pulled like fabric that had been stretched too tight, and her palms felt both numb and tender, as though they had been borrowed from someone else.

“It’s about time we got you in here,” Barbara said to her after supper that first night. “Life’s gonna be easy street from here on out, you’ll see. Breakfast and supper and a bed for three months while they help you find a job. A job,” she cackled. “Sweet Jesus and hot goddamn.”

It was mid-December by then, and that night when Cerise lay down on her cot in the warm sleeping hall, it seemed so strange to surrender herself to sleep without worrying how she might be wakened that she kept thinking she was forgetting something or doing something wrong.

She sank into the richest sleep she’d had for weeks, but she woke past midnight, wracked with nightmare. She lay awake for a long time then, listening to the snores and moans of the women around her, listening to the whimpers of the children who slept on wobbly cots beside their mothers and clutched hand-me-down toys that smelled of strangers’ houses.

In the morning, after a breakfast of coffee and day-old doughnuts, the residents all had to leave the shelter until dinnertime, because, as the director had explained, being out helped them to keep active, encouraged them to continue looking for work and permanent housing.

“Being on the streets all day helps to get you off the streets,” Barbara cackled under her breath to Cerise as they all filed out of the shelter into the rain. “That’s the kind of brilliant dumbfuck thinking that made this country what it is today.

“Well, good luck,” she mumbled, as they reached the first corner and she turned abruptly to go the opposite way. “Hope you find gold.”

“Good-bye,” said Cerise, looking longingly after Barbara’s shambling figure for a moment before she turned to devote herself to the daylong work of staying dry.

Out in the Christmas-colored city, as she moved from one small refuge to the next, she thought she saw Travis everywhere she went. In the mall, whenever a child said, “Mama,” her mind gasped, Travis. Time and again she caught a glimpse of him, sometimes holding a stranger’s hand and toddling across a parking lot, sometimes gazing out at the rain from the window of a passing car. Each time she saw him, she was herself again, cupped for an instant by a kind of grace, though every time he vanished into a stranger’s child, she had to descend all over again into the vortex of her grief.

Sometimes she followed those phantom Travises even after the blissful second had passed when they were hers. She longed to touch or smell them, longed to talk to them. She wished she could give them something—a sticker or a sucker or the quarter she’d found in the gutter. But she was afraid of their revulsion, afraid of the wrath of the adults who held their hands, afraid, most of all, that even if she were to touch or speak to them, they would not notice her. It was as though she had become the ghost, in a world where Travis was still living.

Once she saw a slender girl climbing into a car with a crowd of other kids. The girl’s jeans were so tight they made her thighs look concave, and her blond hair lapped her waist, and for a white-hot second Cerise thought she was seeing Melody. She froze in the middle of the sidewalk, longing and terror detonating inside her. But suddenly the girl turned around. Looking straight at Cerise, she tossed her hair and laughed, and a second later Cerise realized that she was staring at a stranger. But for the whole rest of the day she felt as though she’d somehow seen Melody, after all.

At dusk the women all returned to the shelter, gathering together like an awkward family after their day in the wet parks and crowded malls. Their quarrels and kindnesses flared in the dining room, spilled into the TV room, followed them to the bathrooms and the sleeping hall, and it was almost a relief to Cerise to have the flurry of other lives to muffle the anguish of her own.

One night while she was sitting beneath the poster of Andrea in the TV room, some of the other residents came over to ask if she wanted to join their prayer circle.

“It helps,” Maria said. “To keep the faith.” While the rest nodded fervently, she went on, “We know Jesus has a plan for every one of us. He wouldn’t ask us to endure any more than we can bear.”

Cerise cast a desperate glance at Barbara, who was crocheting implacably beside her, and finally scraped together the courage to say, “No, thanks.”

“What is your story, Honey?” Maria asked tenderly. “You could come to our circle and share it with us and Jesus.”

“No,” Cerise said, so savagely that Maria did not try again.

“So you got a bit of grit, after all,” Barbara observed approvingly after the prayer-circle women moved on. A new blanket, colored like a bipolar rainbow, spilled over her lap and tumbled onto the floor.

“Anyways, I’m like you,” she told Cerise, while her hands moved steadily as a heartbeat and her little hook gobbled yarn. “Troubles ain’t worth a single damn except to maybe teach us who we are, and if it turns out there’s a god puts up with all this shit and thinks it’s cute to make us learn the hard way, I’d say he can go fuck himself like he’s already fucked us.”

Her hook grabbed a loop of orange yarn, yanked it through the turquoise of the proceeding row. She waited for Cerise to speak, and when she didn’t, Barbara reached into the shopping bag that stood open beside her and pulled out another ball of yarn. “Plum,” she proclaimed, as though she were announcing the winner of a raffle.

“Chenille,” she added, savoring the feel of the yarn between her fingers before she tied one end of it to the orange. “Someone spent good money on yarn like that. Most likely her pattern was too complicated,” she went on. “That’s what usually makes ’em give up, what they tell me, anyways, when they give me their throwaways.”

She glanced up from her work to speak directly to Cerise. “Keep your patterns simple,” she said, before splicing her way back into her own conversation.

She sighed and dug her fist into the small of her back. “Their hearts are in the right place,” she said as she took up her hook again and began looping plum chenille to orange wool, “no matter how deep up their asses their heads might be. Besides,” she chuckled, “I always like it when they pray for me.”

It frightened Cerise at first for there to be so many children at the shelter. She almost hated them sometimes, for the way their presence taunted her. In the beginning, she tried to ignore them, tried to sit as far away from them as possible, tried not to look at them or listen to what they said. But when little Carmen Diez tripped in the dining room and gashed her lip on the corner of a table while her mother was working in the kitchen, Cerise was flying across the room before she could think to stop herself. She was there before anyone else had even noticed, before Carmen even began to wail. Scooping the astonished girl off the floor, Cerise pressed Carmen’s face against her blouse to staunch the blood, shushed her when she started screaming, promised her what Cerise knew to be a lie, murmured, “It’s all right, it’s okay, everything’ll be all right.” After that Carmen followed Cerise like a sad-eyed puppy, and soon the other children were also finding reasons to linger near her.

As Christmas approached, Cerise tried to avoid it. At the shelter she shunned the caroling, skipped the trimming of the tree, and when the cardboard snowmen and satin angels went up alongside Andrea’s poster, she did her best to ignore them. But one evening a few days before Christmas, a pious Santa in a red polyester suit and a fake white beard swept into the TV room and Cerise was trapped as he ho-hoed and praised Jesus and handed out packages whose labels read, “Boy Aged 6,” or “Infant Girl” or “Pregnant Lady.”

Only Barbara noticed how Cerise swayed and pressed her hands against her chest as though she had to keep her insides from spilling out. “Hey,” she called across the crowded room, waving her crochet hook, “come over here,” and when Cerise drew near enough to hear, Barbara began a counter-patter of her own. “True meaning of Christmas up your asshole,” she mumbled in Santa’s direction, murmuring it soothingly as a mama crooning a lullaby, while her crochet hook flashed in her hand like a knife blade.

“Up your asshole with a bowlful of jelly,” she went on so softly only Cerise could hear. “There’s plenty of women and babies here tonight who’d be thrilled with a nice dry manger and some swaddling clothes. Plenty of women who’d be Mary in your fucking Christmas play. Up your asshole with a sprig of holly, Santa. Up your asshole with a ho, ho, ho.”

But for once she kept her voice low so she would not offend those who, if they heard, would invoke the shelter’s rules about profanity and remind her how few chances she had left before she would be asked to leave.

A
COLUMN OF CLEAR WATER SPILLED INTO THE TUB
. C
LUTCHING
Ellen to her chest with one arm, Anna knelt on the rug and leaned over to check the temperature of the bath. Wet light filtered through the plants that clustered on the sill of the rain-stained window, and the air was damp and sweet as a child’s breath. Outside it was storming, and the bluster of wind and rain made the room seem so warm and safe and simple that for a moment everything else seemed warm and simple, too.

Christmas had come and gone, and the rain had never stopped. It was the worst rain in ninety years, the meteorologists were saying—record-breaking, devastating rain. Anna and Eliot had planned to spend Christmas up in Washington, in the snow. But a week after the roof began to leak, Eliot discovered an inch of water in the basement and a damp spot growing on the wall of the laundry room, so they’d had to use the money they’d set aside for plane tickets to waterproof instead.

Anna had tried to make a Christmas for them in California. She’d bought a tree pruned like a pet poodle from the forest that sprang up overnight in the Kmart parking lot, and she took Lucy to see
The Nutcracker
and to visit Santa at the mall. On Christmas afternoon, while a dull rain fell, Ellen napped, Lucy played halfheartedly with her new toys, Eliot sat hunched over his computer trying to meet a January deadline for another grant, and Anna fixed an elaborate dinner of Californian ingredients—organic duck, sun-dried tomatoes, goat’s cheese, and fresh strawberries. But when the four of them gathered around the table, the food had tasted too rich, and their ordinary talk—
Pass the salad; Lucy, don’t kick the table leg; Do you think the FedEx office is open tomorrow? Mommy, can I have more strawberries?
—lacked the substance it seemed the dinner and the day deserved. Cleaning up afterward, Anna had felt an empty relief, as though Christmas were another chore she could cross off her list.

And now it was January, and still the rain kept falling. Eliot had met his grant deadline, they’d managed to drain the basement before the water reached the darkroom, and Ellen had miraculously missed the flu that Lucy brought home from school. But despite all those accomplishments, everything seemed as dreary as the rain. Last night after the girls were finally in bed, Anna and Eliot had gone over their finances again.

“I need to get a job,” she’d said flatly, staring at the numbers they could not get to fit into their budget.

“Ellen’s too little for you to be away all day,” Eliot had answered immediately. “Besides, I hate to say it, but I’m not sure what kind of work you could find around there that would even cover the extra expenses of working—day care and transportation and paper diapers and all that stuff.”

“Maybe we need to sell the house,” she’d offered.

“I thought of that, too,” said Eliot, shaking his head. “But housing prices have gone up even since we bought this place. Anything we could afford now would be a total dump, and rent would cost just as much as our mortgage. Plus, we just got your darkroom installed.” He shrugged grimly. “I’m going to start calling around tomorrow and see if I can find us a second mortgage.”

“How would we make those payments,” Anna asked, “if we can barely make our payments now?”

“We’ll have to, somehow,” he’d answered grimly.

Last night, her only answer had been a sigh. But since then, the idea she’d been harboring since the roof started leaking began to bully its way forward in her mind, growing until it was hard to think of anything else.

Anna lay Ellen down on the bathmat and began to undress her. “Beedo, beedo,” Ellen said, smiling up at Anna and twisting her tongue around the sounds, letting the new syllables loll like candies in her mouth. “Beedo, beedo,” Anna answered automatically. She removed Ellen’s diaper, shook a tidy turd into the toilet, and gave Ellen’s bottom a deft cleaning. Relieved of the bulk between her legs, Ellen pulled her foot toward her mouth and began solemnly to suck her toes while Anna leaned forward to check the temperature of the bath.

There was nothing in California she cared to photograph, and Salish was a world away. Besides, she had no time to be a photographer, no reason, in a world so crammed with details and dire needs, to pursue anything as self-serving and uncertain as art. She could keep her 35mm camera for a little longer, and she wouldn’t sell her enlarger just yet, but it made no sense to own a camera that cost more than a new car, especially if she never used it anymore. In a way, she thought as she trailed her hand in the warm water and watched the steam rise into the damp air, it might even be a relief to be that definite about things. If she no longer had her camera, it would be harder to feel like a failure for not using it.

Lucy shrugged her shirt off and wriggled out of her pants and underpants. Standing naked in front of the tub, she asked, “Can I get in now?” She was holding herself in a posture that Anna had noticed her using more and more, with her head bent and her shoulders slightly hunched, as though she were trying to close in on herself. With a start Anna saw how skinny she’d suddenly become, her shoulder blades slicing like knives from her naked back, her ribs jutting against her milky skin.

“Okay,” Anna answered, turning off the taps and giving the water a final swirl with her hand. “Hop in.”

When Anna had asked Lucy if there were anyone from school she wanted to invite over during the holidays, Lucy had only shaken her head. “I don’t think that anyone wants to come,” she’d said, and Anna had wanted to weep with bewilderment and fury that Lucy could possibly feel that way. She’d wanted to round up Lucy’s schoolmates and force them to like her, had wanted to slap them all for making Lucy so forlorn. Now as she watched Lucy climb into the tub, she thought that if she sold her camera, she would be able to volunteer at Lucy’s school instead of having to find a job.

“Can Ellie get in, too?” Lucy asked, sitting down in the tub with a plop.

Happy to hear her big sister say her name, Ellen sucked her toes and sang, “Deeble, deebel, deedee.”

“You get started,” Anna said to Lucy. “I’ll put Ellen in in a minute.”

Ellen’s foot slipped from her grasp, and she looked startled, as though someone had snatched a toy from her. “Guh?” she asked, her voice thick with surprise. Anna lifted Ellen into her arms, and her naked baby-flesh felt smooth as pudding against her skin. Her bottom, resting in the crook of Anna’s arm, was cooler than the rest of her, an amazing mix of soft and firm. Burying her face in Ellen’s neck, Anna inhaled, drawing Ellen’s smell deep into her lungs. An instant bliss surrounded her. She felt a melting in her bones, and thought, Surely all this can be enough.

The phone rang, its sound like a rip in fabric.

“Don’t get it,” Lucy said conspiratorially as Anna turned automatically toward the door.

“I’d better,” Anna said. “It might be your daddy. I’ll be right back.”

Still carrying Ellen, she crossed the hall to the bedroom, leaving the bathroom door open so that she could listen for Lucy. If it was Eliot calling to tell her what he’d learned about second mortgages, she would have to tell him of her plan to sell her field camera. That would be the hardest part of the whole process, she realized suddenly—not placing the ads or watching potential buyers manipulate the bellows and lenses, but convincing Eliot that they had no other choice.

A nervous dread imploded in her stomach as she scooped the phone from its charger and answered it. Shifting Ellen to the other arm, she tucked the receiver into the crook of her neck and headed back to the bathroom.

“Anna Walters?” a man’s voice asked, and her relief that it was not Eliot felt like a gift.

“Yes?” she said with polite expectancy, trying to get the voice on the phone to mesh with any of the faces she’d met in California.

“This is Martin Lee, from the UC Santa Dorothea art department. I met you and your husband once years ago, when I spoke at Spaulding University. I’ve been a longtime admirer of your work.”

For the smallest fraction of time, Anna could not understand what he meant. My work? she wondered, thinking of the swirl of meals and dishes and diapers that made up her days. Then she remembered that other life, her old accomplishments still apparently solid despite Lucy’s loneliness and Ellen’s precarious health, despite the shambles in her kitchen and her decision to sell her camera. Biting back the irony, she make herself say, “Thank you very much.”

Professor Lee was saying, “I’m department chair now. By default, really,” he added with professorial modesty. “You know how these things go. The last one to the meeting gets elected. Anyway, I ran into your husband yesterday in the faculty lunchroom, and he said you’d moved here recently.”

“Last August,” Anna answered, caution and curiosity evenly balanced in her voice. She had a vague idea of who Martin Lee might be, remembered a dapper Asian printmaker with a sprinkling of white in his close-cropped hair. She reentered the bathroom, where Lucy was intently lathering her stomach with soap.

Martin Lee said, “I’m calling because of our photographer—Arnson Hocking. Is he a friend of yours?”

“I’ve never met him,” Anna said. “But I certainly know his work.”

“We’ve been wildly lucky to have Arnie. He’s a wonderful colleague, and a fine teacher, too, in spite of all his fame. But he had a stroke the day before yesterday—quite massive, I’m sorry to say. Of course we’re all terribly worried about him, but spring semester begins next week, and it’s my job to find someone to cover his classes.”

“Oh?” Anna asked. She sank down on the closed lid of the toilet, hugged Ellen in her lap, and held her breath.

“I wondered if you would consider it. There’s not much glory in it, nor even a great deal of money. But then you already know that about academia, after your years at Spaulding University.”

“But I’m not—”

“It’s appallingly short notice, I know. But we really need a photographer of your caliber to cover Arnie’s classes, and I don’t know where else to turn.”

A photographer of your caliber, her thoughts echoed. She stared at the wadded clothing on the bathroom floor and wondered how much she should tell Martin Lee about her life.

He said, “I realize you weren’t planning on teaching this spring, but I’d like to think there might be some value in it for you, too.”

Students, she thought. And colleagues. A salary. She felt something start up inside her, but she caught herself abruptly. “What would I be teaching?” she asked.

“I can find someone around here to take Arnie’s intro class. But there’s an upper-division seminar we’d need covered, as well as several graduate students who need an adviser.”

“Mommy,” Lucy said, standing up abruptly as water poured off her in a minor tidal wave. “I’m hungry.”

Anna waved a hand at her daughter and touched her fingers to her lips to signal
shhh
. Into the phone she asked, “Don’t you need to do a search?” Graduate students, she thought hungrily. A seminar. For a moment she could almost smell the Dektol, could almost feel the bite of stop bath in her sinuses, could almost hear the little click of the shutter opening to admit new light, but she snatched herself back sternly. It’s not that easy, she told herself.

Martin Lee said, “Normally our hiring process is quite extensive, but under the circumstances—”

“I’m starfing,” Lucy said, scrambling from the tub to stand naked and dripping in front of Anna. “You said we’d have snack next.”

Anna shook her head at Lucy, grimaced fiercely.

“You said,” Lucy insisted. “Right after our bath.” Sucking her gut toward her backbone, she clutched her concave stomach and added, “I’m dying of hungerness.”

Anna said, “Excuse me just a minute. I’m sorry. I need to say something to my daughter.” Raising her mouth from the receiver and speaking in a tone she hoped sounded sweet to Martin Lee and stern to Lucy, she said, “Mommy’s having an important call. You go get dressed, and I’ll get you a snack as soon as I’m done.”

“But—”

“Now.” Anna glared so forcefully that—miraculously—Lucy skittered from the bathroom, trailing water down the hall.

“I’m sorry,” she said into the phone. “What were you saying?”

Professor Lee continued, “I know we’re asking a lot on such short notice, but I must tell you that if Arnie is unable to continue teaching, we’ll be looking for a permanent replacement. As visiting faculty, you’d be in an excellent position to apply.”

Your last show was four years ago, Anna told herself. You haven’t made a print in thirteen months. You’re going to sell your camera. She said, “I don’t know if Eliot told you, but we have young children. I’d rather not work full-time.”

“We would work around your schedule as much as possible,” Martin Lee said. “It would be good if you would attend department meetings, but we wouldn’t ask you to serve on any committees. Between your seminar and your other responsibilities, I wouldn’t expect you’d be on campus more than fifteen hours a week—maybe twenty at the very most.

“I wish I could give you more time to make a decision,” he went on. “But if you think you might be interested, I’m afraid I’d need to know by tomorrow afternoon. Otherwise, I’ll have to cast a wider net.”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Anna echoed. Beneath her growing elation, she felt an odd sense of doom, as if whatever she decided, all her failures would inevitably be laid bare.