Pink Smog (2 page)

“Did Charlie call yet?” I asked her. We hadn't seen him for a couple of days. That happened every so often but this time I was more worried about it than usual because the last fight had been so bad.

She shook her head. I could tell by the look on her face that I shouldn't ask any more questions.

I went into my room, put on my bathing suit, which was a two-piece that sagged at the chest and around the butt and was infinitely less sexy than the macramé string bikini I really wanted, and grabbed my mom's
Vogue
magazine and a bottle of Bain de Soleil. On my way to the pool I got a can of Tab, sleek and sweaty with cold. The sun was shining on the water, making long, bright squiggles on the blue. I lay on the plastic lounge chair and slathered myself with the suntan lotion. I drank my Tab. It tasted like sweet liquid metal. I closed my eyes and the sun on the water made sparkling patterns through my eyelids. The sun was like a drug. It burned the sad feeling out of my bones, the feeling that came when I thought of my parents fighting, my dad leaving for days at a time, the empty bottles of alcohol strewn around the apartment. I turned over on my stomach and fell asleep.

I woke up at sunset with my skin tingling. I knew I was burned—I'd be the color of the sky. The air was getting cool so I wrapped up in a towel and went back upstairs. My mom was still in front of the TV. I heated up some frozen mac and cheese for us and sat next to her while we watched
Happy Days
and
Welcome Back, Kotter
. The raised pile of the cheap blue velveteen couch irritated my burned legs but I distracted myself from thinking about that or about my dad by listening to canned sitcom laughter and imagining riding on the back of the Fonz's motorcycle.

“Please get me another gin and tonic,” my mom said, holding out her glass regally without looking at me.

I went to the bar and made her drink, minus the gin.

“And what is this, Louise?” She called me Louise when she was mad.

“My name isn't Louise,” I said. “And it's tonic, Mom.”

“I didn't ask for this.” She glared at me and tapped fake red fingernails on the glass. “Louise.”

“I don't want you to drink so much,” I said.

“Stop telling me what I can and cannot do. You are not the parent.”

But the thing was, neither was she. She didn't act like one anyway. I wanted a mom who would act like one, who would ask me how my day was and smooth the hair out of my eyes and rub sunscreen on my shoulders with cool hands.

The walls of my room were painted teeth-grinding yellow. There were beanbag chairs and the waterbed had beaded curtains hanging around it. My mom had put up a few posters of David Cassidy and Bobby Sherman with their baby faces and shaggy hair and skinny chests but I wasn't that into them. I guess she wanted me to seem like a normal teenager in case anyone came over—she had done all this as a surprise the summer before I started junior high. But I missed my peony-pink room at the canyon cottage where we had lived before it burned down.

I was at home with my mom when the electric wires sparked and the sparks caught a tree by the front door on fire. It turned out that the squirrels had eaten through the wire insulations.

“Squirrels love to sharpen their teeth on those,” the firemen said later.

My mom picked me up, still clutching the book she was reading to me, and we ran outside. I screamed and cried for my plush bear, Mink, and my doll Petal Bug as if they were my children. My mom handed me to a neighbor and ran back in. She grabbed Mink and Petal Bug and brought them out to me. By the time the firemen got there, flames were leaping out of the windows, the air was black with ash, and almost everything inside was gone.

My mom had been brave that day. Strong and brave and sober. But she started to drink when we moved to the Starlight Condominiums where we live now.

I still have Mink and Petal Bug—even though I am thirteen I actually still sleep with them at night and hide them under the bed in the day in case my mom gets drunk and goes on one of her rare cleaning sprees in which she throws out everything in sight. I still have the book we'd rescued, too.

The Lonely Doll
has a pink-and-white-gingham-checked cover and black-and-white photos of a doll named Edith and the father teddy bear and baby bear she lives with. Edith reminds me of a devious Goldilocks who had gotten her secret wish—to take Mama Bear's place. Edith and Baby Bear always get into mischief and Father Bear has to discipline them in a stern but loving way. As a kid I was a little disturbed, but also intrigued, by the way he put Edith over his knee and spanked her.

I knew I was way too old for this book now but I read it in secret when I needed comforting. Sometimes I pretended to be Edith, even with the spankings. I never wanted to end up alone.

That night I took a cool shower, put lotion on my sunburn, and lay down on my sloshy bed and read
The Lonely Doll
until I passed out, holding on tight to Mink and Petal Bug.

The shouting was so loud it woke me. They had been shouting at each other a lot but this time their voices sounded a little different. I opened the sliding-glass door and went out on the balcony. They were standing by the pool under the lights, like they were on a stage for everyone to see. I don't remember exactly what they said and it doesn't matter. My mom had a drink in her hand and even from the balcony in the night I could see that she was shaking in her pink robe. I could smell chlorine, so strongly that it felt like I had swallowed some pool water. I wanted to dive into the pool from the balcony where I stood, dive down into the water where I couldn't hear them shouting at each other, just like our goldfish, Garbo, immune in her bowl with the porcelain mermaid and the tiny castle.

Then I saw my mom throw her drink into my dad's face. He staggered back and reached out and grabbed her by the wrists. He took the glass out of her hand and threw the rest of the drink back at her. I'd seen them fight before but they had never gotten physical with each other like that.

My mom teetered on her gold mules. For a moment, everything was still. You could only hear the pool cleaner chugging and spitting, the water gurgling. Then my dad let go of my mom and turned and walked away. I watched her standing there, watching him go. She didn't even scream anymore. She looked very small from above.

It felt like a long time passed. I heard my father's engine start and his yellow Thunderbird drive away. My chest felt numb, as if I'd just had a shot of novocaine in my heart. And then I watched my mother stagger backward and fall into the pool.

I ran back through the condo and out and down the stairs screaming for help and when I got to the pool I saw a boy in the water with my mother. I dove in, too. The water churned around us, stinging my eyes and nostrils with chlorine and sloshing into my mouth. I reached for my mom but I was suddenly too weak, as if all the life in me was being sucked down the drain at the bottom of the pool. That was when I felt arms lifting me up and out.

Then we were all on the side of the pool and the boy shouted up to the surrounding buildings: “Call 911!”

He was skinny and tan with very strong-looking arms and longish blonde hair that dripped over his face. He bent over my mom and pressed on her chest and water came out of her mouth. I'd learned CPR in camp when I was a little kid, practicing blowing into the mouths of baby dolls, but I couldn't remember anything. But the boy knew what he was doing because he leaned over and breathed into her mouth and I saw her eyelids flutter and she opened her eyes.

In that moment a weird thing happened—instead of the boy, I saw Charlie there, bending over my mom, blowing life into her. For a second they were one person, the mystery boy and my dad. All the love I felt for my father, all the love that had gotten scattered in the wind when I saw Charlie leave, was attaching to the boy like glitter attaches to glue when you sprinkle it on your art project.

He looked at me with his blue eyes for just one second but the gaze dropped so deeply into me, like a stone in water—rings and rings. Then he and Charlie were both gone, vanished, like they had never been there at all.

By the time the paramedics came I had my mother sitting up, wrapped in a towel. The paramedics checked her out and said she was okay and then they left, too. I watched their strong shoulders being swallowed up by the nighttime. I wanted something more from them—some reassuring look or smile, but they had only seemed bored and tired as if they saw this thing all the time. It had only happened once to me and I never wanted it to happen again.

I brought my mom upstairs and put her to bed under the baby-blue satin quilt. I gently combed her hair away from her face. It felt like straw in my hands from all the bleach, disintegrating at the ends. I wiped off her face with a towel and smoothed lotion onto her legs and feet. She started to doze off. I was sitting next to her, holding her hand when she opened her eyes and looked at me.

“Why?” she said. “Why didn't you just let me go?”

“Mom!” I hugged her but she was rigid in my arms. We still smelled like chlorine. The odor made me nauseous. “Brandy-Lynn!” I said. “I need to talk to Dad.”

“Never tell anyone!” She was shouting now. “Never tell anyone about this. Ever. Especially him.”

I won't tell him. But I have to tell someone. I have to at least write it down.

I don't know what happened between my parents. I know that my mom was drinking too much and my dad was “abusing substances,” as my mom called it. I know there were money problems. But I don't know the really deep reasons, the reasons why love can turn into screaming and hate. Or at least something that looks like hate, especially to a thirteen-year-old.

I know that my mom and dad loved each other once. When my dad was successful with the monster and scifi movies, and even after he wasn't, when we lived in that little cottage in the canyon. It had a shingled roof and thick creamy walls and wooden floors that my mom polished with lemon oil soap until they shone. There were big windows with leaded glass panes and a garden full of roses and day lilies. There was a little fishpond and a jacaranda tree and a winding moss-covered path that led nowhere. My dad played the piano with my bare baby feet, dangling me above the keys as I danced out a tune. My mom made pot roasts and baked potatoes for dinner. She wore a flowered apron and her high heels. We all ate together every night. There was one small black-and-white TV but we hardly ever watched it. When it broke, my dad repaired the antenna with wire hangers. The sun shone at a low angle through the leaded glass windows and across the shiny wooden floors, making the dust motes shine like fairies. There was a lemon tree outside my bedroom window and it was covered with pink and white blossoms and yellow lemons, so bright they glowed in the dark. My parents played jazz and rock and roll on the stereo. They played The Beatles a lot. I used to dance to The Beatles for them in the living room while my dad shone a desk lamp on me like a spotlight. I'd make costumes out of things I'd found in the dress-up box. My mom always saved her old dresses, even when they were ripped or out of style, so I had quite a collection to choose from. She had all these satiny cocktail things and lace suits and sequined or bead-covered cashmere sweaters and leopard-print hats and gloves and spike-heeled pumps with pointed toes. My mother had been a starlet before I was born. She met my dad when she landed a role in his movie
Planet of the Mummy Men
. She was so beautiful then, staring up at my dad in almost every single photograph, a halo of light around her pale hair, as she reclined on the beach with her Betty Grable legs stretched out in front of her, sitting at a nightclub in a pink cocktail dress, smiling over her shoulder, her eyes sparkling like diamonds so that she didn't need jewelry. When I saw her on screen the first time, I thought she actually looked like Marilyn Monroe, who she was always talking about. She had wanted to be the next Marilyn. When she gave birth to me on the day Marilyn died, she thought it was a sign. A sign of what, I'm not sure. That she would go back to her career? That I would be an actress? That I was Marilyn reincarnated? That I was doomed because I was born on one of the saddest days of my mom's life, and everybody else's, too, for that matter?

I love how sad Marilyn's eyes look, even when she is smiling. I love her body that just looks like it wants to give itself to everyone like a present. I love her skin and hair like an angel's. (I always talk about her in the present tense like she didn't die—who else do you do that with?) She was married to a famous baseball player and a famous, brilliant writer who looked like my dad. I love that. And I love how funny and smart she is and how she makes people fall in love with her with just one look.

They say Marilyn's hand was outstretched to the phone when they found her naked on her bed in her apartment in Brentwood. I don't think she really wanted to die. But you never know.

My mom almost died that night by the pool. She wanted to, even though she still had me. Marilyn didn't have any kids at all. I used to wish she were my mom—maybe I could have saved her life, too.

But it wasn't me who rescued my mother. It was the boy. I wanted to find him again and thank him.

A
fter school that day, I went from door to door in our building, saying I was doing a project for school on statistics and that I had to find out exactly how many men, women, boys, and girls lived in each unit. I knew most of the neighbors but I kept hoping someone I didn't know, someone who had just moved in, would say they had a son or a brother, or, even better, that the angel boy would answer the door, but there was no sign of him. I wondered if I had made him up. But I could remember his thin, muscled arms and the pale color of his hair and the sharp line of his cheekbones. Also his pale blue eyes, the color of the pool at night. He reminded me of the pop stars my mom had put up on the walls of my room. They all looked a little like girls and that made you like them because they seemed sweet and soft and familiar as well as unfamiliar at the same time. But the boy was much better than the one-dimensional magazine cutouts on my walls. His skin was warm and wet when he dove into my life. Thinking about him made my body pound with adrenalin, made me feel alive with blood. I felt as real as I'd ever felt, so he must be real, too, I reasoned. At least I thought so.