Commune of Women (12 page)

“I’m not leaving,” she mutters, “I’m fucking
fleeing!
”

Her car waits intact out in the driveway, not dripping with slimy green pond weed or showing signs that it has in any way been involved in the surreal business of the night. She opens the passenger-side door and throws in her purse and bag.

As she’s going around to the driver’s side she senses she’s being watched.
Shit!
she thinks, her whole body jerking spastically
. It’s the police! They’ve got guns trained on me!
She looks around fearfully.

There, by the pasture fence, sits Rosebud. Her silky silver and charcoal fur is blowing and glistening in the morning light. Her yellow eyes are trained on Heddi like scopes.

For all the trouble she’s caused her, Heddi still loves this animal. From the first moment Heddi laid eyes on her, when Roscoe brought her home as a pup in the palm of his hand, she loved her beauty. And as the months went by, she learned to love Rosebud’s wildness and her indomitability.

It was only through imprisonment and brute force that Roscoe had any influence at all on her. He wanted her mean. Heddi couldn’t bear the spectacle of his abuses to this animal that never groveled and never broke, but only watched and waited and hated in some fierce recess of her ungiven heart.

“Good morning, Rosebud,” Heddi says softly. She knows that in the kitchen there is a defrosted chicken waiting for just this circumstance. “You’re looking very beautiful this morning,” she croons. She doesn’t make a move toward Rosebud, nor the wolf toward Heddi.

Heddi also knows that the alarm system is now fully armed. No one can enter the house without the code to disarm the alarm, which Heddi does not have. She’s taken it from the wall, wadded it up and thrown it in the waste-basket. If she enters the house and tries to find the code, too much time will elapse and the alarm will sound again. Not only is she unwilling to endure this consequence a second time, but the sound will send Rosebud into the next county.

Roscoe, you clever paranoid,
she thinks, with a sly smile,
you’ve outsmarted yourself.

She looks Rosebud in the eye. They seem to be having a meeting of the minds. The wolf stands in a motion too quick and graceful to see.

“That’s right, Rosebud,” Heddi says softly. “This is your moment.”

Rosebud shifts uneasily, still staring steadily at Heddi. The morning breeze sifts through her soft coat like fingers through fine sand.

Heddi raises her arms and shoos her. “Go!” she says, without much conviction.

Rosebud edges away a few steps. Heddi waves her arms, more agitated now. “Go, Rosebud! Go, girl! Go! Go! GO!”

Heddi is crying, now. She runs toward Rosebud, waving her arms and the wolf turns and begins a slow trot in the direction of the road. Beyond it, in the morning sun, the foothills rise, round and tawny with summer-dry grasses, a few minute’s journey for a fleet-footed animal.

“Go, Rosebud! GO! GO!
GO!
”

Heddi’s sobbing. She’s running down the driveway and Rosebud’s loping through the pasture, parallel to her and a little ahead.

Rosebud turns her long, yellow eyes and looks back, briefly. Heddi feels such a hit of wild love in her heart that she can scarcely breathe.

Rosebud’s running full out now. She’s streaking through the pasture grass like a silver wind.

And then, she’s gone and Heddi is screaming, “Yes! Yes!
YES!
” and jumping in the air and shaking her fists like a madwoman.

“Yes! Yes! She’s
loose!
” She kicks up a small whirlwind of dust, as she spins and leaps and shouts.

“She’s loose! She’s loose! She’s FREE again!”

Heddi throws back her head and howls like a wild thing.

They all just sit in amazement when Heddi finishes her story. She’s told it with such verve and passion that Ondine is sure that she’s not the only one with tears in her eyes.

Heddi has an odd look on her face, half-pleased, half-stunned, as if she’s amazed
herself
with such a passionate telling.

It’s Ondine who says, “And you want one of
us
to follow
that?
”

Everyone chuckles. They start to move and stretch and heft themselves up from their chairs and the floor. Sophia goes into the bathroom. Betty starts dishing out the flat Skip-and-Go-Naked Punch from the dishpan. Pearl cackles over by the candy machine and says, “Maybe we outta have a snack on some a them peanuts.”

Ondine looks at the clock and realizes that two hours have sped by. It’s close to 11:30. Heddi’s plan to make time pass has worked perfectly.

Lunch is pretty dismal. They’re all trying to conserve. They have chips again, Hershey’s chocolate with almonds and some of Pearl’s warm punch.

They vote that after the next person tells her story, they’ll have a mid-afternoon snack. Betty’s isn’t the only stomach that’s rumbling now.

So, they’re all settling back in and Heddi’s looking around for the next person who’ll be brave enough to tell her story. No one makes a peep. They won’t even meet her eye. So, to her own amazement, Betty raises her hand and says, “I’ll go next, Heddi.”

Betty really doesn’t mind because she has this story that is really amazing about her neighbors, Bud and Angela. For years, Angela’s been filling her in on the goings-on at their house and, in this case, Betty took part – to some extent.

“Well,” Betty starts off, “this isn’t a story about me at all, really. But I think it’s interesting enough for you to tolerate. It’s about my neighbors, Bud and Angela, and their son, Bernie. I’m like Heddi...if you’re bored, just let me know.

“I’ll start kind of in the middle, so you get the feel for how things are for them. It seems like there’s always some kind of turmoil over there because of Bernie...”

“What’s that sound?” Bud asks. He’s just shambled out of the bedroom after sleeping off his job on the night shift at Anheuser Busch.

“It’s Bernie,” Angela says, not wanting to say much because she’s right in the middle of Oprah and the transvestites.

“So what the hell’s the matter with him? He got his dick caught in the silverware drawer again?” Bud is almost shouting now because the noise of Bernie, from the kitchen, is rising in volume.

“He’s being a car alarm,” Angela says, waving her hand to shush Bud. One of the transvestites, in a gold lamé floor-length dress slit to the thigh, is starting to tell his story and he’s so beautiful, she just has to hear how it all came to happen this way for him.

“A car alarm? For Chrissake! BERNIE! HEY!
BERNIE!
”

Angela turns on Bud in a fury. “Don’t you yell at him that way! You know he can’t help it. How can you treat your own son like that?”

“Like what? He don’t even know I’m talkin’ to him. Make him stop, Angela. Just make him stop, for Chrissake. I work all night and then wake up in a loony bin. Men in skirts and a son who thinks he’s an electronic device, for Chrissakes!

“I’m gonna do what Don Wilmer did and run off to Mexico. I swear. Make him STOP, will ya, Angela?” Bud throws himself down in his recliner, forgetting that Bernie broke it last week, and almost capsizes himself when it goes over too far backward.

Angela knows she has to do something before he gets to ragging about the chair, too. So she yells back, “And what do you think I should do? When he was two, I could put him outside in a playpen. At twenty-six, he’s a little beyond that. What do you suggest I
do?
” Always best to go on the defensive with Bud before he blows sky high.

Bud now has the
L.A. Times Sunday Edition,
very fat, over his head and he is still lying angled slightly head downward in his chair and listing a little to starboard. He groans from under the paper, “Just do something, or I swear to God, I’m gonna get Don Wilmer’s address from Gus and I’m gonna go to Mexico. Then he can be a car alarm, or a fire alarm, or a godamn fog horn, for all I care because I’ll be hauling in blue fin in Baja.”

Then he went quiet, very still, under the paper. And with Bud, this is always a very bad sign.

So Angela turns off Oprah, very reluctantly, because after the break, the men are going to tell their beauty secrets. But when Bud goes quiet, you sometimes have to make sacrifices.

Angela first learned this when Bernie was about five or six. Bud was reading her this article in the
Times
about how leaded gasoline was dumping twenty tons of lead on the L.A. freeway system every day. Angela said she didn’t believe it. If that were true, their house, which is only five blocks from the San Diego Freeway, would have heaps of raw lead lying around on the lawn. It would be lying in layers all over everything – the car, the patio furniture, the concrete in the driveway. They’d have to bring City trucks and those machines with blades, like snow removal equipment, and be scraping the streets day and night, just to keep people from bogging down in lead. That’s what she said.

But Bud said that was stupid; that it all went up in the air and they breathed it. And it did fall in layers and that was what that weird sticky black stuff was that collected on the backside of the Venetian blinds in the bedroom. He said it was like you took a five-pound box of laundry soap and you spread it all over the house. You wouldn’t really know that there were five pounds of it because it would be laid out so thin. You’d just think it was a little here and a little there.

Well, in just a couple of minutes, Angela saw something out of the corner of her eye which turned out to be Bernie going down the hallway with a box of Tide, seeding it into the shag. That’s the way Bernie shows his Dad how much he loves him – when he listens and then responds.

Well, that was the very first time that Bud went quiet. Only, since it
was
the first time, Angela didn’t know what it was, so she thought he’d just gone to sleep in his chair.

“The green plaid chair, not the blue one he has now,” Betty digresses for clarification. “Bernie destroyed the plaid one with lighter fluid – but that’s another story.”

By the time she’d wrestled the box of Tide from Bernie – who started screaming and rolling on the floor – and vacuumed the carpet, Bud was still in his chair and still quiet. But he had his eyes open, so then she had this moment of horror that he was dead. But, as it turned out, he was just in that place where he goes when there’s really nothing left to say – or maybe he’s ready to start screaming, himself.

So, Angela shuts Oprah off and goes into the kitchen and there is Bernie smearing peanut butter on Rye Crisps and stacking them up in long columns on a plate. He’s making that sound, which is like no other sound, of a car in distress. He really is good at this. Really, if it were another circumstance than his father getting ready to run off to Mexico, you might even admire how well he does it. But obviously, now is not the time.

Now, with Bernie, he is impervious to the human voice when one of these things is upon him. He is so deeply involved with his discovery, whatever it may be, that he just doesn’t hear. So, from the time he was a little baby, distraction was the name of the game.

So without a word, Angela walks into the kitchen, goes straight up to him at the counter and grabs the last peanut butter Rye Crisp from the top of the stack and shoves it into her mouth.

Bernie stops wailing like a vandalized car and shouts, “HEY!” very loud. He looks at her, outraged.

Angela smiles at him, chewing the dry, sticky mess as best she can, and mumbles, “Good!”

Suddenly, his round face, all puckered with concentration and anger, relaxes, and he gives her this smile that from the time he was a baby made all the rest worthwhile.

“I can vouch for that because I used to babysit for Angela, when she’d had enough and really needed a break,” Betty explains parenthetically. “If it hadn’t been for that smile, there might have been one more child homicide in Reseda. Not really, of course. But you just can’t imagine how that child could push you to the limit!”

She looks around, is gratified to find that she has the undivided attention of the group, and continues.

“Yeah!” Bernie says. “Good!” And he holds out the plate to her, to take more.

Of course, he does it too fast and the columns of crackers, already pretty shaky, just topple over and smack to the floor, exploding peanut butter and cracker crumbs over every inch of her freshly waxed tile. But at least, while he’s scrambling around on the floor picking up the biggest pieces and smearing in the rest with the knees of his jeans, he’s quiet. He’s forgotten he was formerly a car alarm and has become, for a few minutes, Angela’s sweet boy again, worried because he’s made a booboo.

So they are both cleaning up the mess for a few minutes before she notices a big silence, like a Black Hole, over near the refrigerator – and there stands Bud watching them with a look that, in all thirty-one years with him, Angela has never seen before. Then, he just turns, walks through the living room, grabs his Rams hat from the hook by the door and leaves.

Even Bernie is impressed. He doesn’t ask, like he does twenty times each time it happens, “Where’s Dad goin’, Mom? Where’s Dad goin’?” Even Bernie is afraid to ask and that can’t be good.

So she goes straight in and calls Betty, who says, “Maybe you should call Madame Zola?”

Madame Zola has a place down on Reseda Boulevard with a big plywood palm and fingers, painted pink, the Life Line in black and
MADAME ZOLA
–
FORTUNES
in red underneath it. Her front windows always have the drapes closed and it seems like secret things are always going on in there behind those red curtains.

Betty first spotted the place years ago when she went to get a prescription for Bernie when he had allergies to grasses one spring, so bad that all he did was sneeze, one right after another, day and night, for three weeks straight. Poor Angela was so exhausted that she didn’t want to drive.

Since then, Betty’s been going to Madame Zola for years, even though Kathy Petersen’s cousin, who was visiting from Tulsa, went to her and swore that she was actually a waitress who used to live in Oklahoma. She said that she was absolutely certain that Madame Zola used to work in a truck stop, nights, and was caught early one morning with the Methodist minister in the back of his car – “
in flagrantee
,” as she said.