Читать книгу Permission - Saskia Vogel - Страница 12

AS I DROVE HOME FROM the art centre that night, I thought about what I had left behind by leaving this suburb for the city. I was born into privilege and raised on narratives of success. But what my dad had called ‘paradise’ wasn’t paradise to me. I couldn’t understand how my parents didn’t see it. I wasn’t sure anyone who chose to live here did. In a newspaper article about a double-suicide that took place on the cliffs near our house while I was in high school, a mother from the neighbourhood asked to comment on the ‘star-crossed lovers’ said, ‘You work so hard to give your kids everything, and they think it’s hell.’ It’s as though she had forgotten how it felt to be in love, what it felt like to be left wanting. What it felt like when material comfort wasn’t comfort enough. And yet, these values are deeply rooted. Sitting in my childhood home, I began to think of myself as a failure, losing sight of the value of the life I had chosen. Seeing Dr. Moradi made me feel like a loser, not least because I knew there was nothing he would have approved of about me now. He was exactly the kind of person who moved here. Or did the place shape him?

On this bulge of land at the edge of Los Angeles, Spanish, Craftsman, mid-century, and ranch-style homes lined winding roads with ocean views. The area had been conceived of as a beachfront retreat in the early twentieth century, beachfront with minimal beach access, for people who wanted to imagine they were beyond the reach of a hungrily expanding metropolis. Way back when, whiteness was the barrier for entry, but now it was only a certain level of success. Success meant money, and any way you earned it seemed fine. All money was moral, but not all fame, as the parents of my friends made clear with their contempt for the city where so many of them spent their days as lawyers and doctors and aerospace engineers. One of my father’s concessions to my mother was that we’d live someplace where walking was possible. She couldn’t have walked to the store, but there were miles of trails right outside our door. I suppose it was a sort of Eden: perfect only in the absence of knowledge from the outside. The people within its borders were trying to recreate places to which they wished to return. None of those places were real.

Unlike the rest of the city it was attached to, the peninsula was dark at night, a regulation intended to preserve the natural beauty of the place. The brightest lights were from passing cars, passing planes, fishing boats past midnight. But the darkness, its bends and corners, attracted a different kind of person, too. People who were out for a drive, who needed to be alone. For an area with good freeway access, it felt remote.

I was still thinking about this, surprised by the intensity of my resentment toward a place I thought I had simply left behind, when I pulled onto our driveway. The house was dark.

‘Mom?’ I called out when I came through the front door. I didn’t want to spook her.

A sound came from the kitchen, a hissing inhalation that might have been a ‘hello.’ She gestured for me not to bother her. She was watching something out the window.

I opened the refrigerator and leaned into its cold air. Forks jutted from the plastic containers of creamy and fluffy mush. I had been telling myself I wasn’t really eating, just picking at the peas and diced ham but not the mayonnaise-y macaroni. Mandarin wedges and pineapple but not the marshmallow. There was so much of that ambrosia, but I’d nearly whittled it down to the cream and carbohydrates. I picked up a fork and found a maraschino cherry still speared on the tines. I ate it. It was waxy, chilled and sickly sweet. I couldn’t seem to get the sugar off my tongue. The fridge made a clicking sound and began to hum. I put the fork back in the bowl and closed the refrigerator door. I poured my mom and myself a glass of water and sat at the table with her, swishing the water around in my mouth, the sweetness diluted, then gone. When I stopped swishing, there were only waves and palms to be heard. They seemed to be growing louder each night.

We listened to the ocean pummel the shore. The phone rang. It went to voicemail. Telemarketer. After the initial shock, the missing, the waiting, there was nothing really to say. Maybe in silence we were understanding each other perfectly. Maybe silence was a respite we shared. I forgave her for smoking. Mom had her cigarettes, and I had my forks in the fridge. Nothing needed to be said, because we knew. We were in mourning, and it was OK to let our mourning be.

My mother sat up straighter.

I scooted my chair around and leaned over so I had a better view. She pointed at the last farm in the area. It wasn’t much of a farm: passionfruit weighing down a rusted chain-link fence. Tomatoes and sunflowers. Leafy greens and strawberries. The farmer kept a trailer on the property, which stretched all the way to the sea and boasted the only passable road that led down to the beach. He’d come after you muttering, wielding something heavy or with a trigger if he caught you trespassing. I heard property developers were always trying to get him to sell, but the farmer must have been happy with what he was making renting out his access road to film crews. A picture truck was parked on the road, carrying something large on its bed.

One second we were looking at the truck, the next we were blinded by a bright, round light. A blue-flamed artificial sun. I had to look away. Chips of ash cast shadows on the kitchen table.

‘They’re shooting a major motion picture,’ my mother said. ‘That actress who looks like you is in it. What’s her name?’

I didn’t want to say it.

‘Lola?’

I nodded.

‘The location manager came by. Nice man. He seemed to worry that we would make a fuss. He invited us to drop by,’ my mother said, sounding as if she thought it were that easy. A nice man came to your door, you had a nice chat and then you were invited to the set, as good as in. She always made it sound like everyone else knew how to do life better, it was just me who refused to walk down Easy Street. Try harder. Be better. Be nicer. Be more like Lola LaForce, who was basking in the same blue light, but being fawned over and paid.

‘OK, I will,’ I said, and started to get up, but then she put her soft hand on mine. The green eyes I’d inherited from her, suddenly sharp.

‘Do. I want to know you’re going to be OK…because…’

The water was rising inside her. She wiped fresh tears away.

I hugged her. She was stiff in my arms. I let her go. We were closer than we’d been in years.

There was discomfort in her smile. Her eyelids, angry swollen red. She fished a tube of hemorrhoid cream from the pocket of her silk robe, squeezed some out on her ring finger, the gentlest finger, and dabbed it around her eyes. Like she’d taught me. Her fingernails were perfect pale ovals. She hadn’t even missed her fortnightly nail appointment at Janine’s. I teared up at the sight of her rings. She was still wearing them.

Her diamonds, her nails, these things that were as they always were: I expected Dad to arrive at any second. The car would rumble up the driveway, the door to the garage would open and slam behind him. He’d want to go for a run before dinner but would decide he was too tired, pour himself a drink, sit on the balcony, and look at the view until dinner was ready. But it was well past dinnertime. And the keys to his car had disappeared along with him, so the convertible was gathering dust in the garage. My mother said she couldn’t find the spare key. I couldn’t bring myself to rummage through his hiding places. Surely, she knew them too. But it was enough to believe we’d find them one day. When we were ready to start looking. Maybe we’d look together, and she’d open up boxes of things I’d never seen and tell me stories about their marriage that I’d never heard. Ones that didn’t end in pain or resentment.

My mother lit another cigarette.

‘It’s time to go home…’ she said in her mother tongue.

To preserve whatever sense of camaraderie we had, I tried not to let on how her words hit me. I did my best to sound calm. I might not have understood her, after all.

‘Haven’t I been…’ I started to say in English. She gave me one of her severe looks, her face all angles, just like mine. Disappointment, I thought, for not answering her in German.

‘I’ve been thinking about Munich or maybe Lake Constance,’ she finished.

She hated being interrupted, but there was nothing she liked more than making a plan, and the anticipation in the run-up, the Vorfreude. This was the best way I knew to apologize: ‘We haven’t been there since Omi died. Does your cousin still have the lake house?’

She tutted. ‘Not for vacation.’

Mom kept talking. Telling me about her plans when the paperwork was done: life insurance and lease policies, transfer of ownership of his business. Paperwork to declare death in absentia. We seemed to have both decided not to bring up a memorial.

‘Won’t it take years?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘The house is in my name.’

I stood at the end of the driveway with a baggie and pipe I’d made out of an apple. I’d found some dry pot from god-knows-when in my closet. It wasn’t good, but it worked. I thought of it like a smudge stick, antiseptic and holy, driving the spirits from me: the what-ifs, the could-have-beens, the where-was-he-nows. I couldn’t ask why because I would only blame myself: if I hadn’t been so nervous as a child, if only I had been less afraid, he would never have been down there. I looked at my skin in the blue light from the film crew and played the air with my fingers. The shadows across the backs of my hands moved like light through water. I imagined pulling him to land.

The dinging of an open car door pierced the night. The sound was coming from the driveway across the road. It was coming from the hybrid. I waited to see the driver. For a second, I thought it might be my dad. Then I saw the silhouette of a woman. She put a box down on the driveway and faced the blue light, and then went back to unloading boxes. I forgot about the daddies. The arms of her T-shirt were cut-off, leaving her ribs exposed, and when she leaned into the car, the T-shirt shifted to show her breasts, small and high. Beautiful. Enviable. So unlike mine. She stopped and looked around. I wished for the cover of night, but she’d already seen me. The woman raised her hand in greeting, and I mirrored her gesture. There was something familiar about her. I was suddenly aware of my heartbeat, but also my cotton mouth.

She smiled and walked to the end of her driveway, across the street from mine.

‘Hey,’ she called out, as if we always talked like this. ‘What’s up with the light?’

But I couldn’t speak. It took everything I had to say: ‘Film crew.’ The words left my mouth, and as they moved in her direction, they left a trail in the air.

‘What?’ She took a step, as if to cross the road.

‘Film crew!’ Louder this time, so she wouldn’t come any closer. I needed to sit down, but I couldn’t tell how far I was from the ground.

We both looked toward the light. Over the waves came a buzzing from the bay. I knew what that was, too.

‘Speedboat,’ I added as a matter of urgency.

She shrugged, like what can you do, this crazy place. I watched her shoulder rise and fall, her beautiful collarbones. My head was nodding slowly.

We looked at each other, the rustle in the palm trees, the film crew working, the speedboat on the waves.

I should have said more, but I could only speak in nouns. I had one more in me and then I needed to lie down.

‘Night!’

Before she could reply, I scuttled back into the house and hid in my bed, staring at the ceiling, hot-cheeked. Hot in the sheets, my body reaching beyond its limits, an anemone waving in the water.