Autobiography of Us (2 page)

“Maybe a little.”

“I’m headed toward something sanguine, in case you were wondering.” She looked at me pointedly. “From the Latin
sanguineus
, meaning
bloody
. Hopeful. Optimistic. Point being, I believe we’re capable of righting certain wrongs. We might be all alone in the world,
en effet
, but that doesn’t mean we have to be lonely.” She stopped me again, and now we were at the edge of the small park across from her house, the canal that cut across the middle sluggish and choked with cattails, the far bank studded with juniper. “So? What do you say?”

“To what?”

She put out her hand, palm flat. “Blood sisters.” She wiggled her fingers. “I saw you fiddling with a pin in your hem earlier. Hand it over.”

“I don’t know,” I began, startled. It must be clear by now: I had never met anyone like her.

“Sure you do.” She gave me another one of her smiles. “Come on, Becky. In or out.”

I hated being called that, but I didn’t dare tell her. She was looking at me closely, her eyes darkened to something like charcoal; after a moment’s hesitation I reached down and undid the latch on the pin, dropping it in her hand.

“Good girl! Now.” She closed her eyes. “Do you solemnly swear?”

She pricked her own finger, then mine. At first I was too busy watching the drops of blood form on our fingertips and worrying about staining my blouse to hear much of what she said: I remember that she kept her eyes closed as we pressed our index fingers together, her voice solemn as she recited our vows. At a certain point I shut my eyes too, more to shut out the glare of the sun than anything. But as I stood there in the afternoon heat with the sharp scent of juniper filling my nose, I realized with a start that I was happy. That the world might fall to pieces and I wouldn’t care, not the littlest bit.

I should have told you all of this a long time ago. The truth is that we weren’t like everyone else in Pasadena, your grandparents and I: house-poor, they’d call us now. My father was the first in his family to graduate anything beyond high school, putting himself through college before the war working odd jobs as a soda jerk and a shoeshine boy, the government paying for law school when he came home early from the war with a bullet in his leg. It couldn’t have been easy, building his way up from nothing, though if you asked he’d say it suited him just fine, thanks. He was a great fan of Lincoln and Adams, your grandfather, fond of quoting them and others on the subject of freedom and the dignity of man.
Lay first the foundation of humility
, he often said—Saint Augustine, I later discovered, though at the time I’m sure I attributed it to him.

My mother held a far more complicated position toward her past. The Pooles were old Virginia stock, a family I knew mostly through the Christmas cards they sent every December like clockwork, their signatures scrawled across the bottom revealing little despite my scrutiny. “Daddy was a wonderful man,” Mother liked to say, pausing for effect, “but he didn’t have a head for business.” Her father had killed himself after losing everything in the Crash, leaving my grandmother to raise Mother and her two younger sisters on little more than sheer determination and the sales—piecemeal—of what had once been an impressively comfortable life: A hundred acres parceled off bit by bit; the rambling old Georgian my grandmother hung on to till the bitter end; a grandfather clock with a cuckoo that sang on the hour; a pair of horses, Duke and Ranger, whom my mother had spoiled with sugar cubes and apples; a baby grand piano my grandfather had played from time to time and whose departure my mother had mourned bitterly, the sight of it being rolled through the front door too awful, she said, for words; box after box of heirloom jewelry; sets of family silver—all of it sold off by the time Mother was in her late teens. When she left for California at the age of eighteen, there was nothing to take with her save the twenty dollars my grandmother slipped into her pocket on her way out the door. “I escaped,” Mother declared. Or: “I got out.” She always did have a flair for the dramatic. A flourish she put on everyday life, like the silk flowers she copied from the ones at Neiman’s, sewing them herself and tucking one into her chignon before she swooped out to a meeting of the Pasadena Historical Society or an afternoon tea at the club.

She was quite beautiful, your grandmother. I must have shown you pictures.

But I don’t mean to suggest we were poor. We were anything but. We simply lived as thousands of others before us have lived, tucked up against the limits of our means. The life we led demanded certain expenses, Mother’s pen scratching busily as she tallied up our bills on the first of each month, doling out the amounts allotted to each category for the upcoming weeks:
House: upkeep
, one column might read.
Car: maintenance; Gas; Groceries; Walter: personal.
And so on. Her father’s loss had imprinted in her the necessity for if not economy then at least delegation. Funds went where they were needed, Mother directing the flow of monthly income as though mobilizing troops: there, not there,
there
. And so our house was large if not overly so—more important, it was in the right sort of neighborhood; there was my schooling—private, Mother insisted; there were the cars, kept long after they had begun to rattle and hiss; a small garden at the back of the house, where she grew prizewinning roses; a yearly membership to the club we could easily have gone without, Mother declaring when my father suggested as much that we might as well go around barefoot and begging for alms. That without the club, we were, to put it plainly,
sunk
.

I must have been an unusually unobservant child, or perhaps I simply kept myself occupied, my nose always buried in a book; I don’t know. I don’t remember minding the differences between my classmates and me until Alex, that’s all. But then I never had what you might call close friends. What free time I had I spent reading, out on the patio or at the kitchen table. I planted myself there with my book and a glass of lemonade until my mother came in to start dinner, announcing that there were peas to be shelled if I was offering, and even if I wasn’t she bet she could find something more useful for me to do.

Still. I would have had to be blind not to see the differences between Alex’s family and mine. That first afternoon I met Mrs. Carrington—I could no more have called her Eleanor than I could have broken into song—I found it hard to look at her directly. She dazzled, the jewels at her throat and in her ears winking in the lamplight, her hair blonder even than my mother’s and set in soft waves. She was languid where Mother never sat still, fond of using long cigarette holders she referred to as
quellazaires.
Mr. Carrington proved equally intimidating, dark like Alex and handsome as a movie star in his crisp white shirts and linen sports coats. Oil money, Mother told me later, Alex’s grandfather one of the first to strike it rich in what was then known as the Gusher Age, which made me laugh.

Their house was filled with similarly beautiful things: fine porcelain vases and heavy damask curtains, thick silk rugs Alex treated so casually I could hardly bear to watch—scuffing her shoes across them after coming in from a hard rain, spilling crumbs, waving a full glass of milk around carelessly as she read to me from one play or another, her voice rising and falling with that wonderful air of drama that seemed to infuse everything she said or did with a sense of the utmost significance. There was a pool in the backyard, set like a sapphire in the lush grass, the bottom tiled with faded paintings of sea creatures I dove down again and again to examine: an orange lobster, a monstrous fish, a tiny, iridescent crab.

I’m embarrassed to admit how quickly I succumbed to shame. How, that first afternoon I came home from Alex’s, I registered the differences between our houses with a dismay that struck me to the core. Suddenly everything wore the look of fatigue: the chandelier above the dining room table scratched so badly on one side that the glass appeared cloudy, the velvet couch my mother had reupholstered herself beginning to pale in irregular circles where people had sat over the years. Even the antique French end table in our hallway my mother prized had gotten nicked along the legs over the years, giving it the look of a castoff—which, in fact, it was. The table had been a gift from Mrs. Peachtree, a neighbor who left it for my mother when she moved away. It was only right, Mrs. Peachtree said, my mother had always loved it more.

* * *

It was an easy walk from where we lived on El Molino over to the Capitol Theater, its floors tiled in an old pink and green pattern I would later learn to identify as Art Deco, the marble refreshments counter tacky with a permanent residue of spilled sodas and ice cream. The man who owned the theater worked for Alex’s father or had worked for him once, I never quite understood—point being, we never had to pay a dime.

We must have seen a dozen movies that first fall, Alex and I. This was 1958, remember. We saw
Gigi
, which Alex hated, and
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, which she adored. It was at the Capitol that we saw
Vertigo
: Kim Novak, blonde and doe-eyed, her face always angled upward as though searching out the source of the light that shone down on her like some alien sun. After, Alex announced she’d drawn up a list of all the roles she meant to play before the age of twenty-five. It was important to keep abreast of these things, she said. To have goals. She’d do Cleopatra, she said. Good old Hedda. Lady Macbeth. Hell, just about everyone Shakespeare had to offer but Juliet, she said.

“What’s so bad about Juliet?” I said. This was out on the bench down by the canal, where we liked to sit after school, throwing pebbles into the water.

“Backbone,” she declared. “Lack thereof. At least Madeleine has her own fish to fry. Not that I care for the whole damsel-in-distress thingy. Fluff is fluff. Never mind if it’s Shakespeare or the pictures.” She took a handful of clover from the grass and stood, dropping them one by one to the ground. “Do you think I’d look like her if I colored my hair?”

“Like who?”

“
Madeleine
, dummy. Right before she jumps.”

“Exactly like her.” I threw a stone into the water and watched the ripples spread outward across the surface: I was nearly fifteen and I had my own ideas about love, each more foolish than the last. “You don’t think Romeo and Juliet are romantic?” I asked after a minute or two. “More than, I don’t know, what’s-his-face and Kim Novak.”

“Madeleine,” she corrected me absently. “Romantic, not romantic—not like it ended well for either of them. Anyway, I’ve decided I’m against it
.”
When she turned to face me, her expression was serious. “Love.”

“But if you don’t fall in love and get married, what do you do?” It was an honest question. In all my favorite novels—
Pride and Prejudice
,
Little Women
,
Anne of Green Gables—
marriage was the inevitable conclusion, the heroine’s fate tied up neatly with a bow.

“Do?” She stepped up on the bench so she stood over me, twitching her skirt out from underneath her. “TO BE, OR NOT TO BE: THAT IS THE QUESTION—”

“Hush,” I tugged at her hand.

“—WHETHER ’TIS NOBLER IN THE MIND TO SUFFER THE SLINGS AND ARROWS OF OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE—”

“Someone will see,” I begged, tugging again. The park was empty, but I could think of any number of people who might pass by at any moment—my mother, hers, one of the other girls from school. “Please.”

She turned to give the canal an elaborate bow before dropping down beside me. “
I
choose my destiny.” Her voice was particularly wonderful to listen to when she got excited, so round and full it seemed less to speak the words than to toss them around like the wind. “My heart’s desire, remember? If you don’t have that, you drown.”

I shrugged: I’d recently gotten in the habit of doing that whenever I didn’t know what to say. “I guess.”

“Don’t,” she said fiercely, sitting up straight. “You
guess
you feel like a Coke. You
guess
you’d like to go for a swim or not. You don’t guess about your life, you
choose
. Or else—”

“Or else what?”

“You get swallowed up like the rest of them.” She turned her gaze on me. “Your mother, for starters.”

“I told you. She fell in love. My father swept her off her—”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t see what’s so terrible about that.”

“Nothing. If you want to be like everyone else, I mean, it’s just peachy.” She looked at me. “Is that what you want?”

“Of course not.” I tried to sound indignant, though the truth was that I wouldn’t have minded in the least. It shouldn’t surprise you to hear that in those days I did everything I could to go unnoticed. Being called on in class was enough to send the blood rushing to my cheeks, my voice shaking in that way it still does on those rare occasions I am forced to speak in front of a crowd.

“God knows it’s easy enough.” She turned back to the canal and watched the slow-moving water. In the afternoon stillness, the low croaking of the bullfrogs formed a hoarse chorus; behind us, hummingbirds darted between the lemon trees that lined the park’s edge. “Eleanor’s already on the warpath,” she said finally. “Next year’s
the
year, she says. Time to spread our wings. Flap, flap,” she laughed a little bitterly. “Baby birds, the both of us. Fledglings. You should see the calendar she tacked up in my room: ballroom lessons, etiquette lessons, fox-trot. Elo
cu
tion, for crying out loud. God forbid I should study anything worth knowing. God forbid I should actually improve my
mind.
Did you know Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays and one hundred and fifty-four sonnets? Do you have any idea how long it takes to
read
thirty-seven plays and one hundred and fifty-four sonnets? Meanwhile, there’s Eleanor saying it’s time to start thinking about a dress for cotillion. Don’t I worry about that, she asks.” She shook her head. “As if I don’t think about it all the goddamn time.”