A Regular Guy (29 page)

“Well, maybe he was standing on something.”

Jane was thinking of him being taller than the midget when he was younger than she was now. He kept telling her she took after him, that she’d have a growth spurt soon. She worried that she might be a dwarf, then thought of Noah and felt guilty. “When you go again to see her,” she whispered, “can I come?”

“You have to ask him.”

“He’ll say no. Just take me along, I won’t tell.”

Owens didn’t excel in the usual places children distinguish themselves. He wasn’t good in school or sports, and when the teachers received the
state test scores every year, they called Nora in to tell her he was underachieving.

“We thought he’d be better in school. His grandparents expected him to be a college professor, or a doctor, even. So we tried to get him to bring his grades up. But he didn’t care. When the teacher asked him a question he didn’t know, he wasn’t the least bit ashamed.

“He’d come in and watch while I fixed dinner. When I asked if he’d done his homework, he’d just smile his goofy smile and say, ‘You know, that water’ll boil faster if you put the lid on.’ I said I could manage supper myself, so why didn’t he see about his homework so his father’d get a good report card this time. And he’d say, ‘Seriously, do you know why water boils?’ ”

Frank Wu came to visit on a Thursday. Olivia had never met Frank before, and she wondered if he’d come when he knew Owens would be at work. Olivia cleaned out the refrigerator while he talked to Nora in the living room.

Owens had told her about Frank. They were both on the night shift at Valley Electronics, and Frank was way ahead of everyone else. They started at nine and he’d have all his work done by ten-thirty. His mom packed great Chinese dinners, which he’d share with Owens. He was in graduate school then but already talking about quitting. Until Owens talked him out of it, he thought he wanted to go work for Ford. He used to fix cars in high school. He had all kinds of pencil sketches he sent off to the Ford Motor Company, Detroit, Michigan. “They were too stupid to even steal them,” Owens had said.

The man had a high voice and a cascading giggle. “I’m frittering my life away, Nora.”

Olivia had all the vegetables in plastic bags and the jars out on the counter. The last of the cherries had rotted. The shelves smelled faintly of pills as she lifted them out to wash.

“Don’t blame him,” Nora said about something. “I probably didn’t teach him right.”

Frank and Owens had paid Pony fifty cents an hour, and on Saturdays, Frank’s four cousins, shy elementary school girls in pink dresses,
worked for free. Three years after that, they made fifty men millionaires, all under the age of thirty. Frank bought houses for twenty relatives. Now he lived up in Berkeley, wandering in and out of classes. Owens thought he was studying arcane dialects of Chinese. They were not in touch. Owens had told her he was kind of mad at Frank for checking out. He had hired thirty-two Wus. Owens walked into the mailroom one day and found twenty-five men squatting with covered teacups, planning a union. “I had to choose,” Owens said. “It was Genesis or Frank’s uncles.”

Frank’s grandfather left too. He was the second Wu to come to California and had lived all his life in a Chinatown residence hotel. His father had laid ties on the Central Pacific Railroad.

“No, Frank, listen to me. He didn’t have any use for ours either.”

The refrigerator began to hum again, covering their voices. When Frank came to say goodbye, he shook Olivia’s hand.

“We’d love to see you sometime,” she said. “Just sit across a table and have some supper.”

“That Frank gave me blood,” Nora said an hour later, while Olivia sat at the kitchen table, giving her a manicure.

Olivia had never had her own mother to herself like this.

Olivia wasn’t the first girl to come to Nora’s kitchen, bearing flowers stemmed in wet paper towel and tinfoil, carrying a washed-out jar, wanting to know about Owens. It had started already when he was in high school. At seventeen, Mary di Natali had come as a girl goes to a mother superior, asking to be let in.

Other girls arrived too over the years. Nora didn’t mind much. Each of them was polite, acknowledging Nora’s position. It was these girls, she knew, who remembered her birthday and coaxed him to behave like a son. Every one of them nudged his generosity. Nora appreciated those girls. But she understood that Olivia was the last. She hoped, for this reason, he’d marry her. Olivia would be the last to know his mother.

On a day that felt like the culmination of a long job together, Nora told Olivia and Karen the story of the chicken.

Owens had had a chicken.

“I don’t know anymore how he got it,” she said. “I s’pose somebody gave it to him around Easter, and this one just didn’t die. It started out a baby chick and grew up into a chicken.”

“Them next door had coops,” Arthur added. He was at home, ready to put in his two cents. “The older boy sold eggs on the paper route.”

“And everywhere Owens went,” his wife continued, “that chicken went too. That chicken loved him. They were together probably a year, he and that chicken. At night, the chicken slept next to his bed. And when he went around the neighborhood, he shoved that chicken in an old yellow coffee can and stuck it on his wagon.”

Arthur laughed, or coughed. “That was the year we put in them sliding glass doors.”

Nora looked up at him. “And was that ever a lot of work. But they didn’t have screens, so we were always telling Tommy to close the door behind him. You know, the bugs got in. And one day I was in the kitchen and I saw him going out the back door, that chicken following behind his legs, and he closed the door and cut the head right off his chicken. I ran and scooped it up in my apron because I was so afraid of him seeing at that age. But he kept on walking into the yard. He never turned back and looked, and he never asked about that chicken again.”

“Never once asked,” Arthur added.

Arthur and Olivia were drinking coffee that day. Nora couldn’t stand the taste anymore; no matter what they did, it was bitter to her. But she still loved the smell.

The three of them sat for a long time looking out the sliding glass doors. A spring wind blew iris heads and papery poppies.

Nora whispered, “Besides Pony, you’re the nicest girl I know.”

Olivia felt a grin growing on her face: the happiness that makes everything want to end. Nora liked her better than Karen.

Finally, bracing herself, Olivia asked Nora if she thought Owens loved her.

“I don’t know,” Arthur said, turning around, his lips tight and eyes alive. Olivia had believed the two things at once for so long that she recognized a clear truth: what that meant, not to know—but then Nora touched her arm. “He does; I can tell. A mother knows.”

Jane sat at the little desk and then lay on the small bed. It was a boy’s bed, decorated with cowboys. I wish we could take it home, she thought. A bedroom set was one of the things she’d never had.

Olivia had brought her along, but only as a helper. She hadn’t told Nora who she was. Earlier, Jane had heated Karen’s oil, and now she sat in his old bedroom, folding the laundry, making the socks into balls. But she wanted to be with them, to look at her grandmother. I’d tell her myself, she thought, just whisper it. Really, Jane was afraid to tell. She wanted her grandmother to take her hand and say, “I know you. I know who you are.”

When she finished the laundry, she snuck out into the hall. Arthur and Nora were putting the dry dishes away in the kitchen.

“What are you doing,” Arthur said, “telling her what you don’t even believe yourself?”

Nora sighed. “Give him the benefit.”

Olivia stepped out of the bathroom and ran up to Jane in the hall. “I almost forgot about you.”

When Nora thanked Olivia for bringing her little helper, she didn’t really look at Jane. And Jane knew that was her one chance. In bed that night, she wondered if his real mother would have recognized her.

Once, Karen made a silly hopeful mistake. They’d gone out to a movie—Karen, Dave, Olivia, Owens, Noah, Huck and some other people they knew then. And in the gravel parking lot, Owens had thrown his head back and laughed at a joke Karen made. His hand accidentally touched her arm, and she felt rough prickles. Even though Owens was with Olivia and she was with Dave, Karen felt he’d noticed her and esteemed her.

Of course, she had interpreted too much. Only a woman unused to love would rely on such small gestures, having no experience of the persistence of seduction, its unmistakable character. But Olivia was new to Owens and he was generous with love, giving off parts of it, like sparks from a torch. One of those burns fell on Karen.

After the movie, they’d all gone out for ice cream. The group clustered in chairs at the front of the small parlor, then Karen slipped outside
with the key to the bathroom in the alley. From there, she overheard laughter in the parking lot.

“But she seems really
old.
”

Karen felt, with horror, that Owens was talking about her. She pressed against the dark wall and waited for the terror to unwind.

“No she doesn’t. We’re the same age; she’s two months younger,” Olivia answered. “She’s pretty, I think.”

“Really? I don’t think she’s at all attractive.”

Karen stiffened, going back into the noisy shop. She could not let them see that she knew. She still needed a bathroom.

Early on a hot Sunday morning, Owens was packing. He poured his shampoo into one of the small plastic bottles made for hikers. He had the perfect garment bag—so thin it held only one suit. He packed shoes, socks, underwear, three new white shirts, still folded in their plastic, and four ties. At the top, he put his CD player and headphones. He would fly in jeans.

Then the phone rang, and it was over.

His father’s voice was low and slow. “About nine-thirty, nine-thirty-five,” he said. “You go ahead and tell Olivia. I’ve got to call Pony.”

The first call he made was not to Olivia but to his secretary, Kathleen, who was out running, her husband said. She needed to call the White House and cancel.

He’d been wearing a tee shirt, but now he changed because he didn’t know what would be necessary. On the winding road, two girls on horseback blocked the way. He waited for them to steer the animals across. One of the girls reined the huge beast harshly; its astonishing head tried to rove and circle, skimming the sky. It was an ordinary, glittering, California summer day, light falling through the trees. The girls’ bare legs were white and thin, draped over horses.

You died on a day that was for no one else different. Girls woke up and pulled on shorts to ride.

He thought of Hirohito’s funeral, the thousands of umbrellas. Churchill’s. You had to hope for a day commensurate, or maybe not. Maybe it was best that those who grieve grieve alone—or not grieve
but go on with their lives so the faint trace would rise up unbidden through their years like the scent of long-fallen apples.

Boys ran and then slammed into the lake, at the end of the day when there was wind, the sun a last twist on the surface. In the water were pockets of warm you found and lost again. When they climbed out, they wore only tee shirts and it was cold down the hill, his jaw and teeth chattering. Running, he tore at leaves to slow him. Trees on the hills where they lived were not old then. Handelman had planted them.

A hundred times she’d waited inside the kitchen door and, after his streak of cold collided into her open wingspan, cocooned him in towel.

Every day and every night he knew her. The way on the bottoms of her shoes it was lighter for her five toes and heel, like an animal’s footprint. A dry rag always hung over the sink spout.

“Last educational degree?” the young woman requested.

“What does it matter?” Owens said.

“We need it for the certificate.”

“She finished high school.” Arthur said this as an accomplishment; he himself hadn’t. “And then she took college courses from time to time, at night.” He opened a folder in which he’d brought her diploma, encased in tissue and cardboard.

Owens thought of his stacks of magazines, plaques, commendations, and vowed to go home and throw it all out.

Then the woman led him and his father to a vast room where they displayed the caskets. They were extremely ugly, Owens noticed. Several seemed to be made of brushed metal. The wooden ones were polished, with satin interiors. And they were all incredibly expensive. Owens stopped before a particularly egregious example. “Why would people buy something like this?”

The young woman shrugged. This unnatural patience seemed to be part of her job. “A lot of people choose them,” she said, “for the hardware.”

His father stood before each one, holding his hands together, as the
woman explained the special features. He finally settled on the least bad box, made of pine. It was also the least expensive.

“Don’t you think we should just go home,” Owens asked, “and make one ourselves?”

“We can buy this for her,” his father said, and Owens let him pay.

Silvery olives and low fruit trees hummed in the distance. “You see this,” Owens said. “Auburn was all like this once.”