Best Friends (10 page)

“ I STILL HAVE THE TICKETS,” my father announced. “You might as well go.”

My mother erupted. “You have the tickets! I thought you'd turned in the tickets! She's already said she's staying here.”

“You're kidding, Dad,” I said. “You still thought I'd go to California for January?”

“I want you to go. I know how much you like it there. I thought the tickets could be your Christmas present.”

“You can't give your daughter airline tickets and your sons screwdriver sets for Christmas,” my mother said. “I'm sorry.”

“No way I'd go, Dad. No way in a thousand years. Turn them in for a refund. Please. Promise you'll turn them in?”

My father sighed. “If I have to, honey. If I have to.”

 

 

 

I BORROWED MY PARENTS' car and went to visit Baxter. He was living in the mother-in-law suite of a rambling house out in the country, with a family whose wife was cousin to the man who was teaching him woodworking. The family wasn't Amish, but Amish farms encircled theirs.

I was driving down a sweeping hillside on a county road surrounded by winter fields when an apparition appeared at the side of the road: a massive man in a plaid flannel shirt, with a dark beard almost to his waist and wild long hair. It was Baxter, waving.

He introduced me to his landlords as “the family brain,” walked me around the barns, drove me to his workshop, and showed me the nailless construction he particularly liked to do. His teacher and boss was a weathered, thin-lipped man maybe twenty years older than Baxter, slight enough to look as though he bought his pants in the boys' department. He barely spoke; his eyes were hooded and intense. “He's an artist,” the man said of Baxter, running his finger over a seam in one of Baxter's chests, and Baxter's face split into a grin so delighted I was embarrassed for him.

I was spending the night and Baxter insisted on giving me his bedroom—he'd sleep on the couch in the sitting room. “Give you a drawer,” he said, pulling out a small drawer from the top of his bedroom cabinet and dumping its contents into a larger drawer farther down. There was the flash of a blue-and-white-striped brief falling out of that drawer, nothing Baxter could wear, or maybe it was a piece of women's underwear? But Baxter pushed the bottom drawer shut and it was gone.

“Do you have friends here?” I asked.

“Oh, sure,” Baxter said. “I'm fine.”

I could have looked in that drawer. Baxter slept heavily, and in his apartment nothing squeaked. But I remembered my father watching
Gilligan's Island.
I gave Baxter the dignity of his secrets.

 

 

 

ONE DAY LATE that winter, I was at the supermarket doing my mother's shopping when I ran into Dr. Danforth, one of the doctors from my father's old office. He was heading down an aisle and I called after him, belatedly realizing as he turned that maybe he was trying to avoid me. This got me mad. Dr. Danforth had always been my buddy when I worked at the office. I didn't like his wife, but I liked him. And he was my father's favorite doctor. A real gentleman, Dad said.

“How are you, Clare Ann?” Dr. Danforth asked.

“Fine,” I said. “I'm at home and I'm taking some courses at the branch.”

“Oh, you're not finishing at Oberlin?”

“I'm done there. I'll get an Oberlin degree, I'm just finishing up some credit hours.”

“You're getting an Oberlin degree,” he repeated. “I'm glad. Your father's very proud of you. More than you know. Very, very proud of you. He'd do anything for you.”

“I'm applying to med school,” I said.

“I see.” Dr. Danforth nodded. I thought he might offer me a job at the office or a med school recommendation, but he didn't. “Well, it's very good to see you,” he said in a quizzical but final sort of way. “You look well.”

You look well, I thought, walking away. That must be a doctor compliment. You do not look eaten up with cancer, you do not have blue fingernails, there are no maggots crawling out of your nose. You look well.

Screw you, you slimy old doctor, I thought as I reached my parents' car. I kicked a wad of dirty ice out of the wheel well. You'll die a long time before I will, Dr. Danforth, I thought.

 

 

 

ASTONISHING HOW QUICKLY my life—along with my parents' life—changed.

I got a job as a waitress in a twenty-four-hour diner and moved back into my old room. My father started working in the hardware department at Sears. After a few weeks, it was clear he wasn't right; he didn't eat, he left buttons on his shirts undone, he forgot which days he was scheduled to work. I heard one of his coworkers, a guy not much older than me, refer to him as “the old man.” “He's very stressed,” my mother said, “and it's stressing me too.” Actually, I got him to the doctor. He had cancer of the stomach with metastases into the liver, and the estimate was three months to live. At this point my mother insisted they sell their house, because my parents had no health insurance and the bills were staggering, and my mother didn't want to be left a widow in debt. I don't think my father was at that point capable of making big decisions. The money I earned as a waitress helped pay the rent on a one-bedroom apartment, where my bed was set behind a screen in the corner of the living room. I went to one med school interview but started crying in the middle of it, and after that I withdrew all my applications.

I don't know which seemed more dreamlike, the waitressing and the doctors' waiting rooms and that tiny apartment where my mother fixed creamed everything on toast (cheap, and my dad could keep it down), or the trip I made back to California. The trip was a present—ostensibly to Sally—from the Roses: a flight back to California with them and Sally to celebrate the end of our college life. “Go for me,” my father said. “I insist.” I had eight days off work. The Oberlin graduation had gone well: my father was not only alive (it had been three months and three weeks since his diagnosis), but he hadn't needed his wheelchair once, and at dinner the evening before the ceremony, he'd enchanted Sally's mother. “He has such kind eyes,” she told me more than once. Between Mr. Rose and my father, there was a certain wariness. Sally had told me once that sick people made her father nervous. Mr. Rose directed his conversation to everyone but my father, throwing his credit card on the table like a trump card. Later he slapped my father on the back so hard I winced.

“Oh thank you,” my mother said. “Oh my, this has just been lovely.” For a socialist she loved fine dining.

 

 

 

“YOU HAVE TO BE a doctor,” Sally said as we sat, in the middle of the afternoon, in a dark California bar. We were twenty-two, finally legal in a bar.

“Why?”

“Because you're smart, you're compassionate, and deep down it's what you want to do. It's your calling. Like the law is a calling to me.”

“That sounds sort of religious.”

“Well.”

“But I don't do religion, Sally. Remember when I was going to observe the Sabbath?” We both laughed.

 

 

 

MRS. ROSE WASN'T COOKING much. She spent most of her days in her bedroom, curtains closed except for a seam of light, drafting letters to her pen pals. “It must be interesting to be a waitress,” she told me, “meeting people not like you.”

California seemed different to me. I didn't like it as much anymore. On and around Mulholland, you never saw people in their yards. And their yards weren't really yards, they were landscaped areas, terraces or flowerbeds or trees surrounded by vegetation, not expanses you could tromp around in. You did see gardeners who looked Mexican, although Sally said they could be from Central America. You saw Chinese houseboys on the streets walking dogs, and occasionally you saw a jogger, usually wearing a sweatband and dark glasses, either a celebrity or disguised as one. That summer the fence around Sally's family's property was topped with swirls of barbed wire.

“I don't know why Daddy put that up,” Sally complained. “Talk about ugly.” There had been robberies. The neighbor on the east had moving picture cameras installed above his doors. The neighbor on the west had dogs.

And Ben? He got older. He got friends. He missed Sally's and my Oberlin graduation because he had to stay in Los Angeles for school. I think that was the first year of the camera. He wanted underwater equipment so he could take pictures of his buddies in the pool. “It'd only be two hundred dollars,” he whined to his dad.

Sally's father insisted that I call him Sid, telling me, “You're a college graduate. I didn't even finish high school. You're a hell of a lot more educated than me. And wait till you're a doctor, huh? Wait till then!”

He sat beside his pool and spouted his ideas about the world. Being in Ohio had reminded him he was glad to be out of the east, because easterners were hidebound—“But you could use another expression.”

“They told me I couldn't do business out here,” he said, “but I showed them.”

“Why?” I asked. “Is magazine distribution mostly based in New York?”

Sid gave me a curious look. “A lot of it is. And I have to go to New York sometimes, but I try not to make it a habit. They think they have everything, they don't seem to understand that our business is entertainment, and what's the entertainment capital of the world?”

I was expected to answer. “Here.”

“Here.” Sid nodded approvingly. “You betcha. All the pretty girls come here, all the studs come here.”

There was smog but a breeze by the pool, a wonderful green smell. Ben was launching off the diving board into his cannonball and Sally was sitting on a deck chair reading
Chilly Scenes of Winter,
her feet propped on another chair. The palm trees were high, exultant, not droopy and sheltering like the trees at home. Patricia, back with the Roses, her mother in Mexico dead, picked up and refilled our glasses.

“It's not that the brains come here,” Mr. Rose went on, considering. “It's more the meat.”

What Sid would really like to do, what he'd always dreamed of doing, was something with the Bible. “Maybe a movie,” he said one night over dinner. “A movie of those great old stories that have survived thousands of years.”

“What, like Adam and Eve?”

“And the flood, and Abraham and Isaac, and Daniel and his dreams. And the whole David saga, wow. Those are great stories. Got everything in those stories. Sex, violence, greed, jealousy. Family betrayal. I'd like to see a movie of the real stuff. Not that Ten Commandments crap.”

We ate more of our wonderful meal, the only meal Sally's mother cooked all week, and then Mr. Rose started talking about taking his family to Israel, and not just Israel but the whole Middle East, to see the places where the Bible stories had occurred.

“Like the mountain that Moses came down with the tablets, what was that? Mount Sinai. You've seen that movie, haven't you, Clare? Old Charlton. Or the spring Bathsheba bathed in. Remember? David liked the looks of her, so he sent her husband off to battle. It worked, too. Sacred places, right?” He nodded at Sally. “That's what your Elascu guy talks about.” He was referring to the book he'd read with Sally for her religion course. “And who knows if they're the real places, right? But you think they're real, so they're real.”

Every time I tired of Sid, every time he seemed stupid or tasteless, he popped up next with something dazzling.
You think they're real, so they're real.
The notion was so expansively wise, world-accepting, not like, say, the narrowness of my mother. Are you sure you're all right? she'd hector me. Why are you losing so much weight? And those foolish things you're doing—why would someone with an IQ like yours ever leave a van in drive?

I seemed to be eating fine in California.

I'd thought that everyone got narrower as they got older, more stubborn and convinced of their own rightness. What a relief to know Sid, whose mind was getting larger! I understood his reading Sally's course books in a new way. He wasn't an overly possessive, hokey father: he was a man trying to enlarge his mind.

“I KNOW HE IMAGINES me in front of a jury,” Sally said, “and the irony of it is, if I go into estate law, the last thing I'll ever want to see is a jury.”

We laughed. That day we were sharing some sort of low-fat blended fruit drink at a juice bar, feeling very virtuous to not be eating ice cream.

“I don't know what my parents expect from me,” I said.

“I'm sure they expect what all parents expect,” Sally said. “Perfection.” She gave a peculiar smirk, a flash of bitterness toward her father that was so quick and unexpected I think I laughed again.