Die a Little (3 page)

waving a mangy trout in the air. We were probably around four and seven, and both of us tanned and naked to the waist in a way that makes me blush.

"The faces alone--if it weren't for those little braids tucked behind your ears, I couldn't tell you two apart," Alice says, trying to meet my gaze.

"Yes. Same blond curls, until Dad made Bill get regular military-style cuts."

"And you a little tomboy, too."

"We both liked to fish and play outdoors. Cowboys and Indians, I guess. I don't really remember," I say, even as I remember everything, even in one wave of sharp grass, rowboat creek, feet pounding tag, whispers from top bunk to bottom in the heavy July night.

"It feels so different, so ... impossibly different from my childhood."

Alice rubs her brow.

"I guess you were a city girl."

"Hmmm," she murmurs. "That, too. And no brothers or sisters and no grandparents I ever met. And no homestead. I mean, I know you moved a lot because of your father's different posts, but it seems like you always had a real home. A house, the same furniture and things.

We always lived in furnished places. I remember instead of counting sheep, I used to recite the places I'd lived: five bungalow courts"--

she counted them off on her fingers--"Corrington Arms, El Cielo Court, La Alambra Bungalows, La Cienega Arms, Golden Dreams Bungalows. And eight hotels, four rented rooms, two in-house maid's quarters, and one rented house that my mother skipped out on so fast we left everything behind but a laundry bag full of dirty clothes.

We never even had the same car for more than a few months."

Alice grins, as if suddenly remembering. "The only thing that was constant was the set of Johnson Brothers china my father had from his mother and her mother. It dated back to the Gold Rush, I think.

When I was little it had twelve place settings. Each move, when my father would pack it up carefully in the same old cloth napkins, there would be fewer pieces. I broke a few washing them. Rough moves broke lots of cups, especially the handles. But mostly my mother would throw plates or saucers at my father when they fought. Surest way to get a reaction out of him."

I smile and feel relieved to see Alice's eyes turn gray-brown, like coffee with cream. It is a story filled with dirty ghosts, yet there's a fondness in the way she tells it, a pleasure in its rangy tumult.

"I always used to sweep up the shards afterward. I can picture the little blue flowers now. One night...

"One night, she was so mad, so furious, I remember she cracked one over her own head. And I remember laughing, because it was funny, like in a movie. Like Laurel and Hardy or something. But then Die a Little -- 14 --

it didn't seem funny at all when I looked at her face, which looked cracked, too. There was blood, yes, but it wasn't that. Her face was so ... unhinged ... that it was as if it had split. As if she had split."

Alice touches her face as she says it, the heel of one hand under her chin, the other on her forehead. "It scared me. My pop, too. He kept looking at her. She was standing still, her arm hanging there, holding the broken shard at her side. She was shaking, but she didn't say anything. Like she was shocked by what she'd done. Like she couldn't believe she'd gone that far."

As Alice tells me this, I turn away from her. I stare hard at my hands, wrung around each other. I am afraid to look over at her because I know what I will see. I will see her eyes turning, always turning back to rot.

Die a Little -- 15 --

[?]*[?]

After the honeymoon period, when real life had to resume for them, Alice was determined to make a home. She had quit her job, had her last day at the studio just before the wedding. She was so relieved, had found herself disgusted by her work, tearing fabric apart and replacing panels because of a variety of stains left by actresses, stains suggesting encounters had while still in costume. She'd throw them in the bin to be laundered, always asking the laundry girls never to bring her costumes that hadn't gone through them first. She wouldn't miss that, she assured me. Not one bit.

Now, hunched over her Singer, she made curtains for every room, bright curtains that hung stiffly or blew languorously; she painted the walls by hand, apple green, buttercup yellow, creme caramel.

She planted tomatoes in one corner of the small yard and dug flower bulbs along the perimeter, trimming the grass around every curve of the small footpath to the front door.

Bill insisted I take all our cooking and baking wares, farm-style pieces of cast iron and heavy wood. It was just as well for Alice, who wanted her own things, and she set out to fit her sunny yellow-painted kitchen with all things modern.

Small, well-chosen pieces, of course. She bought a set of casserole dishes with rattan frames made by Gladding, McBean. She asked my brother for, and received, Broil King by the Peerless Electric Company for her birthday. She bargained successfully with the salesmen at McCreary's Department Store in downtown Pasadena for a prime deal on a set of Samson folding chairs by Shwayder Brothers. She bought a Cornwall Thermo Tray with gold finish and wooden handles for serving hot artichoke hors d'oeuvres and tuna squares.

Only a few times would I actually see Alice cleaning, but the immaculate house revealed that cleaning must have been going on all the time. I could picture her on hands and knees, hair covered in a topknot cloth, scrubbing fervently, greedily, so gladly because nothing seemed to make her happier than seeing pure lines, smooth surfaces, sharp corners, and the smell always of cleanliness, intense, pungent, shaded over with the scent of fresh-cut flowers or a simmering stovetop.

Despite all her prewedding glamour, Alice quickly became the most quiet, the most demure of a quiet and demure set of junior investigators' wives. She was the first to bring the tuna noodle casserole to the new family that moved in, or to the household with the sick mother. She attended church with Bill and often me, turning the pages of the hymnal with her immaculate white gloves, Die a Little -- 16 --

apologizing that her half-Catholic, half-Pentecostal upbringing hadn't prepared her for the Lutheran service we attended.

Almost instantaneously it seemed, Alice, with her fresh and lovely looks and her handsome, upstanding husband, had made friends in the neighborhood. It was not long before she and the other women in the cul-de-sac began buying each other things, visiting gifts, housewarmings. They bought each other mint julep sets made of aluminum and cork, copper fruit bowls, tidbit stands, pink Polynesian chop plates adorned with a black palm frond pattern, spun aluminum nesting bowls with neat reed handles, Pyrex hostess sets for picnics on the back lawns, Klise Frosted Oak relish boats and cheese boards with Lucite inserts, Manta Ray centerpiece bowls with a chic black glaze or elegant figured white, canape rosettes with three banked levels which as the pretty box said, "make this tray an ideal serving accessory for 'after bridge' and for afternoon teas."

For months, it seemed all she did was bake. She was learning by doing, with Betty Crocker perched on the counter, with Joy of Cooking, with our mother's dog-eared collection of country cookbooks. She made a raspberry-coconut jelly roll for a brunch with the Leders and Conlans. A rum-and-cherry-cola marble cake for a cocktail party. Caramel-apple chiffon cupcakes soaked through with Dry Sack cream sherry for the Halloween party. On Bill's birthday, she spent hours making cream-puff swans shaped from what she carefully pronounced as a "pate a chou." For a block party, almond icebox cake and cornflake macaroons. Chow mein-noodle haystacks and fried spaghetti cookies for a neighborhood association bake sale.

For a dinner party, white chocolate grasshopper pie still foaming with melted marshmallows and doused with Hiram Walker. More dinner parties and still racier items, ambrosia brimming with Grand Marnier, a fruit-cocktail gelatin ring nearly a foot high and glistening. As the parties grew more elaborate, more frenetic, bourbon balls studded with pecans and Nesselrode pie with sweet Marsala and chestnuts. Strawberries Biltmore covered with vanilla custard sauce. Baked Alaska drizzled through with white rum. Peach Melba suffused with framboise.

Soon, she had no rival. In the neighborhood and among the investigators' wives, she set all the trends, and everyone else followed.

It was as though she had waited her whole life for this.

As the months passed, however, I began to see glimpses, odd, awry glimpses of a different Alice, an Alice somewhere between the girl in the picture of Breuer's Chocolates and this matchless homemaker. At parties or bridge gatherings, in the ladies' room after three stingers, she'd lean over to me, hot alcohol and perfume, and whisper something like a clue, "When I was a department store model, a customer once paid me seventy-five dollars to come home with her Die a Little -- 17 --

and put on her dead husband's clothes, piece by piece. She played 'I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles' on her turntable over and over all night. She never laid a hand on me, but she might have. Love is funny, isn't it?"

Or "This old roommate of mine, Lois, she bathed every night in rubbing alcohol. She'd bathe in it for hours, and then come out and coat, coat her body in jasmine lotion--together, the smell was like a punch in the face.

"Then--listen, Lora--then, one night, my other roommate, Paulette, had a date over and he--his name was Dickie--was on the fire escape smoking. Next thing we hear this scream, horrible, like an animal under a car. Apparently, Dickie had thrown his lit cigarette down the alley and the wind carried it up and through the bathroom window. Lois was just getting out of the bath covered with the alcohol. We ran in, and we got the bath mat around her, rolled her on the floor, like they tell you to do in school.

"Her skin felt like crinkled paper. I could barely look at her. I kept thinking her flesh was going to fall off in my hands. Then it turned soft and shiny, like wax. The bath mat was cheap, and bits of it stuck to her. When Paulette looked down and saw what was happening, she started screaming. I had to slap her three times.

"Lois was okay, some second-degree burns on her stomach and her thighs. What was funny was that Dickie felt so bad, he kept visiting her at the hospital, and the next thing you know, they were a couple.

Things happen like that sometimes. It didn't last, those things seldom do, but when I would see them, out in Santa Monica or Hollywood or something, they'd be sitting together, smoking like chimneys, and I would laugh, and Lois, one tough nut, she'd laugh back and wink and say, 'Where there's smoke there's fire, honey.' "

Die a Little -- 18 --

[?]*[?]

It is after one of Alice's triumphal dinner parties. Alice and I are washing dishes while Bill drives a few intoxicated guests home. As she leans her face over the steam rising from the scalding dishwater she favors ("Splendid for the complexion"), we laugh about how enamored of Bill his senior coworkers seem.

"I guess they're especially glad they have someone young enough not only to run after witnesses but also to play first-string quarterback for them against Glendale PD."

"He's the youngest by six years." I smile, trying to be careful drying Alice's new china. "The second youngest junior investigator ever to work in the D.A.'s office."

"I didn't know that. How did he get such a position so young?"

Alice turns and looks at me, face piping red and dappled, eyes lit.

"You mean he never told you?" I say. Then, shaking my head, "That's so like him."

"Never told me what?"

It is then that I tell her how Bill was promoted after an incident that received a great deal of local attention.

It was his fourth year on the force, and Bill's partner had just retired.

A rookie officer named Lester was assigned to him. Only a few months out of the academy, Lester was thrilled to have such a hot beat.

The first night they rode together, they received a call from a fiercely angry woman who claimed her teenage son was spending time with a street gang and probably had been involved in recent vandalism and maybe even the latest stickup in the neighborhood.

He had been a good, churchgoing boy, and now he was on his way to being a hoodlum, plain and simple. It was all on account of this pachuca girl he had fallen for who had been to reform school and only dated boys who proved their street mettle.

Bill and Lester went over to her apartment, which was heavy with die-cut crosses on the walls and a plaster saint in one corner. Bill was dubious. The woman, tightly wound and incessantly gesturing with the large tinted photograph of her son at age four in her hand, seemed unreliable and maybe even a little crazy. Bill started to wonder whether or not her son was still even in the picture. Maybe he had run away; he'd seen lots of things like that, lonely-sad or lonely-mad people worried about or seeking revenge against spouses, friends, lovers who were actually long gone.

Die a Little -- 19 --

The woman decided, tossing the photograph on the worn couch, that Bill and Lester should help her search her son's things for evidence of criminal activity. Aching for action, Lester started up to his feet, assuring her that they would find something, if there were something to find.