Caroline's Daughters (5 page)

“But she's probably too fat,” Fiona and Jill have concluded.

Caroline too has taken note of Saul as a dedicated husband, and remarked to Ralph, “How wrong I was to urge those kids not to get married. You see? When I'm wrong I'm really wrong.”

Liza's days, these days, are often spent down at the playground (across from Roland Gallo's house). She takes the baby and the middle child there, the older one being in nursery school, as next year this barely steady two-year-old will be.

And that playground and park, for Sage the scene of such lonely, jealous anxiety, for Liza is filled with happy nostalgia. “Let's go down to J.K. and turn on,” the kids used to say, after school—and then they would, ambling or sometimes running down the hill to the park, Julius Kahn Playground, and to some special places off in the woods, the cypress groves. Someone always had some joints, several people had transistors, and they were all off and away, sucking down smoke and laughing and floating, off into the sky with Lucy, with diamonds.

Liza liked all that a lot. She liked her friends and the dope and
the music, she felt perfectly happy then. In a permanent way she is crazy about that park.

She especially loved making out, making love with those boys, almost all of them, at one time or another.

Sitting now on the hard green bench, as her small child pushes a dump truck through some sand in the sandbox, Liza sighs for those years. It is not so far back, really, but so passed, now so totally gone, swallowed by the strange Nixonian Seventies, and now the awful Eighties.

And then she thinks, If I'm pregnant now I don't know what I'll do. (With Liza this is a frequent concern.) Could she have an abortion without telling Saul? And if not why not? Because it's his child too, that would be one reason why. But I cannot have four children in this rotten, rotting world, thinks Liza.

“Well, Liza, hi!” A white-blonde young woman, about Liza's age, with a child the age of Liza's sandbox child now sits down on the bench beside her, all bright smiles, as her child, a little girl, stumbles into the sand, down to Liza's child, a boy. “
Good
to see you again,” says this woman, all teeth, all enthusiasm.

“Oh, good to see you!” But Liza is unable to remember this woman's name, or where they met. Some cocktail party, she thinks, and now she does remember: it was the sort of party that she and Saul never go to but this time for some reason they had to, and there was this woman, who said, when introduced to Liza (who has kept her own name—she has her own plans, for her name): “Are you by any chance related to Fiona McAndrew? The Fiona of Fiona's? Oh, her sister? How marvellous! Such a rich famous successful sister! How exciting!”

Well, small wonder that Liza could not recall her name.

“Isn't it funny, I thought of you this very morning,” this Joanne now tells Liza. “We're going to Fiona's tonight, and I'm so excited! Do you think we'll see her there? Will I know her, does she look a lot like you?”

“I honestly don't know,” says Liza—a covering answer. And then, “She's quite a lot thinner than I am.”

“In her business? Wow, she must really work at it.”

“I suppose she does.”

This exchange of inanities could go on all day, Liza thinks, or for several days, except that the two small children just then begin to scream. One has thrown sand at the other, now both are throwing sand and screaming, eyes and noses wet, baby voices hoarse with passion.

“Oh shit,” says Joanne. (To Liza, her most sympathetic utterance so far.) “I'll have to take her home to change, we're on our way to Roland's mom's. Lucky for me we live right over there.”

Thus reminded, Liza now recalls that Joanne indeed is married to nefarious Roland, Sage's once-lover. Roland left the wife to whom he was married in Sage's time to marry this Joanne, to marry Joanne instead of Sage. Joanne, even younger than Sage, and so stupid—further cause for chagrin.

Watching silly Joanne as she plucks the child, now calmer, up from the sandbox, saying goodby and watching as Joanne starts off across the grass toward her splendid house, Liza remembers all that her sister suffered on infamous Roland's account, and she feels a renewal of that old rage as she further thinks, What a total jerk, choosing that dopey woman over beautiful talented Sage. And not quite consistently she also thinks, How lucky after all that he didn't marry Sage. And she adds, Noel's quite bad enough.

“San Francisco is the smallest town I've ever been in,” is a frequent remark of Caroline's, and one that her daughters have sometimes put down to sheer snobbery, shades of English Molly. However, in one way or another, from time to time, they all come to agree with her, more or less. Particularly, Liza now thinks, when faced with coincidences of this very small-town nature: running into Joanne Gallo in the park, on the day when Joanne is going to Fiona's.

“I'm the non-achieving sister,” Liza has had occasion to remark, though perhaps it is she herself who has created these occasions, through a bad habit of self-depreciation.

The usual rejoinder is, “Oh, but you have those great kids, and a really nice husband; in fact he's great, and attractive.”

And all of that is perfectly true, Liza knows very well. And yet, and yet, these days it is simply not enough. Now women are supposed to have a great husband and children and run several corporations; be good at Leveraged Buy-Outs or design marvellous post-modern houses. Or run for public office. Or maybe all of those somehow at once. Not to mention being very thin and aerobically fit, a memorable cook-hostess-decorator. And fabulous in bed, multi-orgasmic and tender and demanding, all at once.

“It's like the Fifties in spades,” Caroline has remarked, of the present decade. “Only then we didn't have to have careers as well. We were just supposed to make all our own curtains and iron a lot of shirts, and do what people back then called ‘gourmet cooking.' You know, all that cream-enrichment business that now you're not supposed to do at all.”

Liza thinks her mother is quite right (as usual). Too much indeed is asked of women now. And men are not helping as much as they think they are, even Saul is not. And she, Liza, is asking too much of herself. Probably. Nevertheless.

The fantasy with which Liza comforts herself for this perceived underachievement of her own is that in another five years, say, when she will be just forty, and all three kids will be in school, then she will write a novel. And then more novels. Liza McAndrew, a novelist.

In the meantime she reads, and reads, and reads, her taste running generally to heavy Victorians, Mrs. Gaskell and Gissing and Trollope, Dickens—and, further down the line, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Bowen—and of course Virginia Woolf.

She keeps a notebook in which she writes every day. And this is a secret from Saul, one of her few: if he knew that she kept some sort of secret journal, he might suspect that she wrote about him, which, meticulously if for the most part lovingly, she does. She writes about everything, her mother and sisters, her father and his girlfriends, her stepfather. Her sisters' husbands and lovers, and their work, their successes (Fiona, Jill), or unsuccesses (Sage, so far, and Portia). Her friends.

Also, in an acerbic, occasionally mean-spirited way that would
probably have surprised anyone who knew her, Liza writes about the current San Francisco literary scene. “Such as it is,” as Liza herself might put it. She has found it interesting, for example, to note that the local writers, all male, who were so prominently billed as such (“
LOCAL NOVELISTS X AND Y
”) in the Sixties, early Seventies—those who at that time spent all their days at Enrico's Coffee House (always hard to imagine when they wrote), now seemed to a great extent to have faded away. Their books if published at all do badly, are even ridiculed as sexist, macho stuff.

But Liza wonders: are these valid critical or even novelistic observations, or is she simply mean and envious, even of those old has-been writers? of anyone, in fact, who has published.

She thinks continuously, though, of her own novels, a long bright row of them, all fat and heavy and deeply satisfying. Complex and funny, and beautiful and wise. Books that everyone or almost everyone will love.

In the midst of this fantasy, however, today Liza is struck by the cruel realization that she could quite as easily be imagining children, a row of babies. Plump and handsome, funny and wise, and almost universally loved.

Sighing, Liza thinks, I cannot have four children. I cannot. I want to write.

Looking up from these not entirely encouraging thoughts, Liza sees a thin woman in jeans and a shabby red sweater hurrying toward her, a young woman whose heavy dark hair swings out as she walks, who walks happily. And whom at first, in her own abstraction and confusion, Liza does not recognize as Sage, her own Sage. Her favorite (she sometimes thinks this) sister. Half-sister. It is Sage, looking totally happy (further reason not to recognize her), Sage trying for whatever reason to repress that joy. Or perhaps only trying to calm down.

“Oh, I found you!” Sage sits down on the bench beside Liza, breathing hard, as though she had been running all over the city, looking for Liza.

“Sage, tell me, what on earth?” Liza laughs, and reaches to give Sage's shoulders a light quick hug.

“
Well
.” Sage too laughs, clearly at herself, at her own too-obvious inability to contain this excitement. “Well, I can't even remember if I told you, Noel said not to tell anyone and so maybe I didn't. But I sent some slides to this man in New York, and he called me just now, and he wants to
give me a show
! Isn't that really fantastic? A New York gallery! A show!”

“Oh, Sage, that is so super.” But even as her eyes tear over (surely with pleasure for Sage?) Liza hears a new, quite horrible interior voice that says, God, one more sister with some big success out there in the world. And I just keep on being a tired and semi-broke mother who's pregnant, probably. I'll never get to write books, even if I could write, which is dubious.

But, “Sage, that's fabulous,” Liza says quite loudly, silencing those other, awful voices with her own actual kindly voice.

And Sage of course hears only the spoken words.

However, strange Sage, who is unpredictable, has already gone off in another direction. More precisely, she has gone backward, in the direction of Roland Gallo. “You know, I still even now think of Roland in this goddam park,” she says to Liza. “People don't get over things, really, do they. Even getting this great news, I sort of thought of wanting him to know. That I'm not just the run-down kid radical he used to know.”

With these reflections Sage's face has gone from near-ecstasy to a wild black melancholy. Only the intensity is constant.

As Liza thinks, No wonder men find Sage just a little wearing, certainly a man like Roland would have. He probably only meant to have some heavy motel hours with an almost beautiful young girl, whom luckily no one would know. And Sage is probably a little much for poor foolish Noel. Men are not really mad for complexity in women, or big intensity.

She wonders if she should tell Sage that she just saw Roland's dumb blonde wife, the ubiquitous Joanne. And she quickly decides that she absolutely should not, and how mean and stupid of her (of Liza) even to consider telling. Indeed, what sort of person, what sort of sister is she becoming?

Sage has now gone back to her excited, happy phase (“a manic-depressive on a very short cycle,” Sage has described herself as being). “I haven't even told Noel this latest, about the show,” she
says. “Lord, what will he say?” Her eyes glitter, challenging, seeming to dare Noel not to be as happy as she is.

“He'll be so proud,” Liza tells her, hoping that this is true.

“You can't tell with Noel,” Sage muses. “I can never predict with him.”

“That's supposed to make life interesting.” This had come out with more irony than Liza intended, and so she adds, “You'll have to go to New York! What fun!”

But just as Liza is thinking how silly that sounded, even how false, Sage has got quickly to her feet again. “I've got to tell Jim,” she announces. “It's Wednesday, he just might be at home, don't you think? Before golf.”

“I guess.”

“Well,
ciao
.” Sage laughs; they both dislike people who say
ciao
. And then she is off, running across the park in the direction of Jim's condominium. Her stepfather, Liza's father, whom Liza almost never sees.

At that moment, for no reason, Liza's child in the sandbox begins to cry. He sits there and screams, his face all red, his eyes and nose streaming.

Going over to pick him up, Liza reflects that this particular child is quite as mercurial as Sage is. She hugs and comforts him, and considers the oddity of genes—odd that a child of hers should be like Sage.

She reflects too on Sage's news, and she tries to imagine this new person, successful Sage. With a gallery in New York, and big sales, maybe.

The small boy in her arms stops crying and nestles his head against her, as Liza thinks, You're only tired, poor baby.

And just then she experiences the sensation for which all that week she has longed: the cramping twist that with her announces the onset of a period. And Liza thinks, Oh, thank God. Now I can write.

F
or years now Fiona and Jill have begun their days with a phone call, one of them to the other. And who calls whom is not incidental, they both keep track. Promptly at 7 one of them will make the call and they will talk, sometimes for only a couple of minutes, sometimes for half an hour or more. This total accord in habit is possible because of what must be a genetic similarity, both are people who wake up mentally alert but physically very lazy. They are ready for talk, that is, though not for any more demanding activity.