Shining Sea (9 page)

Molly lifts her ankle-length granny dress and clambers up onto the hood. At fifteen, she's taller than most boys her age. She's not taller than he is, but their legs stretch side by side on the hood of the Chevy. “That was easy.”

“Yeah?”

“I just started walking
away
from the crowd, in the direction of the highway.”

“I wasn't going to leave without you,” he says. “I was looking for you.”

“Yeah,” she says.

“A lot of people here. More than thirty thousand.”

“Yeah. A lot more. Ten times more.” She smiles and slugs him. “Pretty far out.”

He opens the flap of his blanket, and she squeezes under it. They lie there, looking at the stars, listening to the faraway sound of music.

“Bet your brother Luke wishes he were here,” she says.

Maybe Luke is here. Who knows? “There's Sagittarius,” he says.

She searches the sky. “You're sure?”

“Yes.” He uses a finger to trace the archer for her. “See? There's his centaur body. There's his shield. There's his lifted arm.”

Molly pulls the filthy blanket further up over her, claiming most of it. She tucks her chin in. In the dark, she looks even more like Aunt Jeanne than usual—long-faced, coconut-haired. “You know what I've always thought was kind of strange?”

“What?”

She giggles. “How can there only be male centaurs? I mean, wouldn't there have to be female centaurs, too? So there would be, you know, new centaurs?”

He remembers the girl with sunspot eyes. He thought getting it on with a girl would be the ultimate trap, but it turned out to be the opposite. For a brief minute—he winces; a very brief moment, the first time around—he disappeared entirely. Now he wants to do it again and again. He wants to find that girl. He wants to find all the girls. All the Joans. All the Lisas. He wants to disappear over and over again into them. They won't own him. They will free him.

“We'll have to ask your mom, the classics professor, to explain the reproductive lives of centaurs,” he says.

Their laughter mixes with the sweet air and fades away. Molly props herself up on one elbow and looks at him. “Are you going to be a hippie now?”

“I already am a hippie.”

“Seriously.”

“Christ, Molly. No. Probably what I'm going to be is a shaved-headed soldier and then a shaved-headed corpse.”

She sits all the way up. “Don't say that, Francis. That's just stupid.”

“Well.”

“Well, nothing.” She throws the blanket off. “Hey, this is a downer. Come on, let's go back and listen to some music.”

“No. I dunno.”

“Eugene's waiting for us.”

“You know where he is?”

“Of course I do, silly. You're the one who got lost. Not us.” She kicks him.

He breathes in the night air. Hanging low to the west in the sky is the string of stars that make up the constellation Pisces.

He sits up. “Found.”

Molly slides off the hood of the car, extending a hand to him in the semidarkness. “You'll be okay, Francis,” she says. “Eugene and I will hold on to you.”

He takes her hand. The peace it gives him won't last. It can't last. But for now, it will have to be enough.

S
WIRLS OF BLUE AND
pink and pale yellow, like a melted Bomb Pop, spread out over Squaw Peak toward the north. Outside the library's large glass windows, random palms blacken against the sky. Toward the downtown are the dark silhouettes of Phoenix's three or four tall buildings, and then nothing, the city fading out into endless desert, flat, flat, and more flat.

“Barbara,” the librarian whispers, beckoning from the front desk. “Would you mind? I have to…”

She shelves the last book on her rolling cart and slips behind the circulation desk. It's almost closing time; probably no one will come in. But maybe someone will still come in. Or one of the few people left in the library will have a book to check out. There's the stamp—for a moment or two, she'll be the same as a real librarian, not a once-a-week volunteer shelving books, taping book covers, watering plants. Not just a transplanted housewife desperate to find something to do. With the Mexican girl whom Ronnie insisted she hire to clean the house and no one left at home but Sissy, her life is so easy now. It's enough to drive her nuts.

The library's glass front door opens. She straightens in her station. An elderly man in silver-rimmed glasses and a woolen cap shuffles in and up to the desk. He lays a well-worn copy of
The Sensuous Man
on the counter.

“Good evening,” she says brightly, keeping her expression steady and professional. The effort not to laugh is almost painful. “Do you want to return this?”

“Yes.”

She flips the book open and checks the card in the library pocket. “Sir,” she says, “this book was due at the end of January.”

The old man frowns and scratches his neck. The skin there is sun-stained and deeply etched, like the earth after one of Phoenix's rare but violent sudden rains. “Are you saying I need to pay a late fee? Because I didn't receive a notice from the library telling me when February started.”

She's not going to laugh. She's definitely not going to laugh. She inspects
The Sensuous Man
for any new damage, turning it over in her hands. “The library doesn't do that, sir. Individuals are responsible for keeping track of how long the months go.”

“Harrumph,” the man says, opening a battered wallet. He counts out a couple of dimes from its coin compartment. “The library used to send out notices. I'm sure they did.”

She opens the metal box and drops his change in, biting the inside of her lower lip. “Thank you, sir. You have a good evening.”

“Thanks, Barbara,” the librarian says, returning, glancing at the book, then tactfully looking away. “I guess it's time for you to go now. Did you check that in? Would you mind shelving it before you go?”

“Not at all.”

The Sensuous Man: The How-To Book for the Man Who Wants to Improve His Lovemaking
. The author is simply “M.” Well, just “M” is easy enough to find. But which category? History? Science? She stifles a giggle. Sports and entertainment?

Maybe she should check the book out herself and leave it on Ronnie's bedside table.
How was the library today, hon?
Ronnie will ask when she gets home, giving her his nightly peck on the cheek.
Great!
she'll say.
I brought a book home…

Sociology and anthropology: 301.41. She slips
The Sensuous Man
into its place on the shelves.

Back at the circulation desk, she gathers up her coat. “Good night, Barbara,” the librarian says. “Thank you for your help. Will you be back next Wednesday?”

“Of course.”

Her first lifeline after moving to Phoenix was the library's weekly Spanish class.
¡Buenos días, señor!
Within a few months, she could almost communicate with the housekeeper. And at Ronnie's favorite Mexican restaurant? For a change, she was the smart one in the family:
Take the
sopa
. It's soup
. Tortillas?
That just means “corn pancakes.”
Not that there are so many more Spanish speakers in Phoenix than in Southern California, but it felt like a way to make a place for herself in this city. Even Luke—before he went off with the hippies—would turn to her to explain stuff. It was nice to know something none of the others knew—something educated, not just about cooking or cleaning or taking care of babies. That Spanish class was the first bright spot of her new existence in Phoenix.

She still felt like one of those Apollo 11 spacemen here, though, bouncing over the moon's surface, unable to plant her feet on the ground. All her life, she'd lived by the sea. Suddenly, she was a castaway in an ocean of sand. The Spanish class helped her interpret what was going on, but it didn't make her part of it. So when the Spanish teacher mentioned that the library was looking for volunteers, she put her hand up immediately. Anything to find her way into the heart of Phoenix. They'd bought a house here. The kids had begun in new schools here. She couldn't give up.

It's two minutes before 6:00 p.m. A lady wearing a thin-brimmed felt hat, her coat draped over a chair beside her, sits at one table, flipping through a magazine—waiting, perhaps, for someone to pick her up. At the other table, deep in a novel, is a girl wearing a miniskirt so short it'd be almost impossible not to see her panties.

Look,
she feels like saying to the girl.
I see you in here all the time. Don't sell yourself short. And for God's sake, don't get into trouble.

The hardest part about leaving Los Angeles, when it came down to it, was not the prospect of having to find her way in a new city. It was leaving Patty Ann. Saying good-bye to Mike was easier; he was likely to get sent over to Vietnam soon anyhow, and the army would take care of him. But who would take care of Patty Ann? She's asked Francis to keep an eye out, now that he's nearby, at UCLA, but Francis is useless for stuff like that. She hears more about Francis from Patty Ann than she does about Patty Ann from Francis.

“That looks like a nice book,” she says to the girl. “Are you enjoying it?”

The girl looks up, her face like the light at an intersection: surprise, suspicion, shut. “I checked it out with the other librarian already.”

“I'm not a librarian,” she says and slips her handbag over her wrist.

She hasn't brought the car. With winter settled over the desert, it's cool enough outside to walk the half mile home in comfort, and she likes that fifteen minutes of being untethered. Tonight she's especially glad for it; she's felt oddly out of sorts all afternoon, as though on the verge of having a terrible headache.

Cars roll past her, their lights catching on the front windows of ranch houses, illuminating the bright yellow brittlebush, casting its herbal scent into the evening. She doesn't know why she's felt so strange today, lost in thought half the day, going over all the old stuff. Luke tried to convince her before he followed that raggle-taggle group of hippies into the desert:
It's real, Mom. They're building a self-sufficient city,
a utopia in the desert. I want to be part of it
. She never thought he'd really do it. She looked the word up.
Utopia: An imaginary place in which the government, laws, and social conditions are perfect.

Imaginary, indeed. Any place where life is perfect is imaginary.
America
is
a utopia,
she told Luke,
or at least as close as we can get on earth. Would you rather live in the Soviet Union?

The strange waterless undersea landscape of the desert lured him. And the kids, the wrong kids. Until the army did what she couldn't and found him and dragged him back out. After his tour is done, he'll get his GED and follow his younger brother to college. Then he can go build his utopias if he still wants to.

“Hello, kiddo,” Ronnie says, already in the kitchen, mixing pink liquid in the old white pitcher. He pecks her on the cheek. “Feel like a strawberry daiquiri?”

“Practicing already for when Nancy and George come over on Friday?”

Ronnie laughs. “Practice makes perfect.”

She turns the oven on. “Dinner will be ready in a jiffy. I'm just going to check on Sissy. She in her room?”

“Yes. You know, she looks a little pale.”

She smiles. “Sissy always looks a little pale.”

But Sissy, lying on her bed with one of her notebooks open, does look even paler than usual. She sits down beside her nine-year-old daughter and touches her broad freckled forehead. “Heavens, Sissy. You're burning up.”

Sissy pulls away. “I'm okay. I mean, I feel a little bad.”

“Hmm.”

Back in the kitchen, she takes the meat loaf out of the fridge and puts it in the now-warm oven. The night before library days she prepares a dinner she can heat up when she gets in. “Sissy's come down with that flu that's going around.”

“Oh, jeez. Poor kid.” Ronnie hands her a daiquiri. “Then we'll just have to celebrate on our own.”

“You signed a new contract?” Ronnie was right about Phoenix being the place for his company. The city is growing like wildfire.

“A
big
contract. A new shopping mall going up in the north of town.”

“Oh, Ronnie. That's wonderful.”

He raises his glass to her and takes a drink. “I was talking to one of the partners in the mall, an older fellow. He said he grew up here in Phoenix, and when he was a boy he lived in an adobe house, just like the Indians. In the summer, they'd soak the walls and curtains with a hose, then set a fan on them. That was their air-conditioning.”

“I guess it was cheap, anyhow.” She sips from her drink. It tastes too sweet to her, strangely chemical. She sets it down.

Ronnie looks carefully at her. “Are you okay? You look a little pale, too.”

She shrugs. “Maybe I'm fighting the flu also.”

In the morning, Sissy's temperature reads 101 degrees. She gives her two orange St. Joseph aspirin and makes her drink a cup of weak tea. After Sissy's temperature drops, she bundles her up in a blanket and brings her out to the sofa.

“I'm going to make you some chicken soup now.”

“My stomach hurts.”

“I'll bring you some ginger ale. But not at the same time as the soup, because if you drink cold with hot your teeth may shatter.”

Sissy sleeps most of the afternoon. She ladles herself a bowl of soup also and sits down to eat it, watching her youngest child's carrot-colored eyelashes flutter with dreams, her chest lift the blanket draped over it up and down. With the older kids, she never had the time for a moment like this. She hardly had the time to sit down to eat. They were happy kids, though. They were a happy family. Even after Michael was lost, although not as happy. How could they have been?

She feels her own forehead. Not hot, as far as she can tell. She's almost never been sick. When would she have had time for it?

And yet she still feels off.

She swallows the last of her soup. She's promised to help out with making costumes for Sissy's school play—she'll get started on that.

When Sissy wakes, her temperature is high again, but not as high. Ronnie comes home, and she sets about cooking liver and onions for dinner.

“I'm not going to eat that,” Sissy says from her makeshift bed in the living room.

She laughs. “Glad to see you are feeling more yourself.”

She makes Sissy a poached egg and toast and pours her a glass of ginger ale. After Sissy's done eating, she gives her one more aspirin. She takes one herself.

“Do you want to watch TV?”

“Will you watch with me?”

“Go ahead,” Ronnie says. Sissy rarely asks for company. “I'll clean up.”

She turns the TV on and nestles on the sofa, slipping Sissy's head onto her lap. The Winter Olympics are on; they are taking place in Japan. There's a crime show and a noisy variety hour. She turns the TV back off.

“You wanna help me with your costume for the play?”

Sissy nods, propping herself up into a sitting position. “Okay.”

Ronnie joins them once he's done washing the dishes. He picks up the latest issue of
Life
. “Looks like this guy faked his whole story about Howard Hughes.”

“Who's Howard Hughes?” Sissy asks.

“Rich fellow from Texas,” Ronnie says. “Made out like a bandit during the Depression.”

When Ronnie doesn't say anything more, Sissy looks to her. Ronnie never wants to talk about what he might have gone through during the Depression. Like Michael, he settled in California after his service and never went back to his home state. Not even one time, from what she can tell.
Not close
or
none
he's said the handful of times she's tried to ask whether he has any family still in Iowa.

“A few people did all right,” she says. “But most people didn't.”

Sissy lays down a piece of cloth, forgotten. “Did Daddy's family?”

“His people were fancier, but like everyone else during the bad years they had no money. When your father was little, his dad still made his doctor rounds in a horse-drawn buggy. By the Depression, they had a car—but not much money for gasoline.

“Of course I just heard all this from your father. I only met his parents one time, right after your father and me got married.”

“Why only once?”

“That's just how it was. We didn't have much money at first for traveling, especially with your father finishing his medical studies, then we started having all of you, and there was a continent between us.” She won't say it, but maybe, just as she didn't ever want to return to San Francisco, Michael wasn't interested in being reminded of his old life. This must be why Ronnie never goes home, either, although neither she nor Michael was quite so drastic. People created new lives after the Depression, then the war. It wasn't running away. It was running forward. All of America did it. “And then your grandmother got the polio. Your grandfather went right after. That was way before you were born.”