North of Montana (7 page)

“Hey, I’m perfect.”

“You try to be. That’s why you’re throwing phones against the wall.”

We are moving back toward the doorway of the stairwell. My body feels like it has been run over by a truck.

“It’s not just Carter.” Struggling to put a label on it: “There’s some weird stuff that came up that might involve my family.”

“I hope your grandfather is okay.”

“Him? Healthy as a horse and knocking the hell out of golf balls in Palm Desert.” It makes me feel brighter to think of Poppy in his yellow Bermuda shorts out there at seven in the morning with the other old farts—a foursome of retired policemen if you can picture that, cursing and telling racist jokes all the way down the fairway—embraced by the baking heat of the rising desert sun and the infantile pleasure of their unbroken routine.

“Poppy’s got it wrapped,” I tell Donnato. “No, it’s these other people.”

“Relatives.” Donnato shakes his head. “Take ’em to Disneyland.”

The wonderful simplicity of that idea makes me laugh.

“Okay now?”

I nod.

“Can you take care of it?”

“Sure.”

Donnato squeezes my arm. “Good triceps.” That wry, affectionate look. “Go swimming. See you tomorrow.”

When I duck inside to grab my bag I notice the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise embracing the phone in a tangled heap on the floor, the empty hanger still rocking above it.

SIX

A FEW DAYS later I slip into my car with the intention of returning a humidifier. I hadn’t been too precise about changing the water so it stopped working last winter and rotted in the bedroom all spring. When I finally dumped the tank out sometime around Halloween it was evident that new life forms had sprouted inside. The store where I bought it guarantees a “lifetime warranty” so you can keep bringing in the old fishy-smelling one and exchanging it for a brand-new one, no questions asked, for the rest of your life. I know, because I already pulled this stunt last year, when the original humidifier dried up and died.

Somehow despite the excellent intention of running over to Century City and back during my lunch break, I am still sitting here in the G-ride without having turned on the engine. I have found the Bible that belonged to Violeta Alvarado thrown on the passenger seat along with a ton of papers and law books and am looking through it, suddenly disoriented in the middle of the parking lot of the Federal Building.

Slowly removing the crossed rubber bands with the same care as Mrs. Gutiérrez, I run my finger down the dense type printed in Spanish on delicate tissuey pages and look through the faded snapshots again, stopping at the one of Violeta’s mother holding a baby. Behind them the landscape is gray green, scrubby and heartless.

I have never been to the tropics. I cannot know what life is for that woman and that baby. My past begins and ends with my grandfather—his California boyhood, his own mother’s trek across this country from Kansas, his devotion to the moral duties of police work in the expansive fifties, have formed my sense of myself as a full-blooded optimistic American and, growing up, there was never any reason to question any of it.

Now I am forced to question it all as I hold a piece of paper torn from a small notebook upon which is written the name of a white woman who allegedly fired a cousin of mine who was Hispanic. The name is Claire Eberhardt. The address is on Twentieth Street, eight blocks from Poppy’s old house, north of Montana, where I spent the first five years of my life, in the city of Santa Monica—a former beach town of funky bungalows and windswept Pacific views that has now become an overbuilt upscale enclave on the westernmost edge of the Los Angeles sprawl.

Even pulling out of the parking lot I hesitate, then make a decisive turn away from Century City and the sweet new humidifier, west down Wilshire and on to San Vicente Boulevard. These days I come to Santa Monica on Bureau business or to catch a movie at the Third Street Promenade, but north of Montana is definitely not my turf. This is the land of the newly rich where noontime joggers pass beneath scarlet-tipped coral trees on a wide grassy meridian. The Ford looks stupid next to Mercedeses and BMWs and hot Toyota Land Cruisers that have never seen a speck of mud. I take the fork onto Montana Avenue and curve past a golf course. Already the air is flooded with the scent of flowers and cool watered grass, pine and eucalyptus.

The top end of Montana Avenue could be a small nondescript residential street anywhere, but as you pass a school and start down an incline all of a sudden you are hit by a row of shops with blue awnings.

I have noticed that whenever you have awnings you have quaint.

On Montana Avenue there are lots of awnings: maroon awnings with white scallops, artsy-fartsy modernistic awnings that hang by steel cords.… The stores that don’t have awnings make up for it with two-story glass windows and dramatic lettering, letting you know that it takes a special kind of money to shop here: a lot.

Males and females amble along carrying shopping bags or pushing baby strollers, enjoying themselves. I guess they have nothing else to do all day. Sidewalk tables are filled with folks taking a leisurely lunch under green umbrellas, watching the steady stream of traffic flow down Montana Avenue to the ocean, which you can actually see at the rise on Fifteenth Street, a flat band of blue straight ahead.

I’m kind of mesmerized, it’s a different pace from the rest of the city and my old neighborhood after all, even if I could never afford to live here today. Passing the vintage Aero Theatre now wrapped in a slick retailing complex, I wonder if as a girl I ever saw a movie there, then on impulse turn up Twelfth Street looking for our old address.

There it is, just past Marguerita, beside some big pink modern construction with round windows: an old California cottage, which must have been built in the 1920s, with a pitched roof and a real estate company’s For Sale sign out front. I park with the engine idling. The house is
tiny;
a modest-sized beech tree in a dry scrap of a front yard easily hides half of it. The wood siding is painted a sickly tan and the front door and trim a kind of red chocolate brown. There are two narrow glass panels on either side of the door. The only distinguishing flourish is a bit of arched wood over the entryway supported by two posts, like an open bonnet with trailing ties.

Something hits my windshield, a spiny round seedpod from a gum tree growing near the curb. I wait for some revelatory memory to hit me over the head but there is nothing, just an abandoned old house. The property next door is also for sale. It is made of white clapboard and small enough to be home for a family of field mice. The chain-link fence that separates these two relics has been long smashed at the post, as if the neighbors had a problem backing a car out of the mouse-sized driveway.

It is curious all right. The age of the place alone makes it easy to picture Poppy as a handsome young man with blond hair and strong jaw striding out the front door in his blue policeman’s uniform, my mother on the strange little side porch coming off the kitchen shelling peas in some kind of a hairdo from World War II.… But that’s imagination, not memory.

My earliest real memory is of an event that took place fifty miles south. It was the first day of kindergarten at Peter H. Burnett Elementary School in Long Beach, 1965, when my mother said goodbye on the sidewalk and turned away, seemingly without emotion. Before that moment when she pushed me out into the world at the age of five there is only darkness and silence, but afterward I remember everything: the weak feeling in my legs as I crossed the schoolyard alone toward the sandy-colored building. The exotic art deco architecture that made it look like a castle carved from brown sugar. Inside I remember the spice of tempera paint and the fresh smell of new books and my first friend, Laura Levy, who wore two neat braids. We had sour-tasting milk in the afternoon.

Poppy, my mother, and I lived on Pine Street in an upper-middle-class neighborhood called Wrigley. Most of the homes had been built in the thirties, Craftsman or bungalow style, but ours was redbrick and brand-new. The trolley tracks ran two blocks away and it was a big deal to take the Pacific Electric Red Car into downtown Los Angeles to go to Cinerama or the May Company, a fancy department store they didn’t have in Long Beach.

The Public Safety Building that housed the Long Beach Police Department, where Poppy eventually earned the rank of lieutenant, was then less than ten years old, and seemed very forward with its sea-blue glass and columns encrusted in mosaic tile. In Southern California in the sixties everything was on the upswing.

I could continue from there, a million tiny remembrances of a normal childhood in a sunny coastal town where farmers would come to retire from the brutal winters of the Midwest; a conservative, easygoing community before developers got ahold of downtown and surgically removed every last twitching tissue of life. My claim to fame at Long Beach Polytechnic High School was being elected captain of the girls’ swim team. My best subjects were science and math. The motto over the school entrance still reads, “Enter to Learn—Go Forth to Serve,” and I guess I still take it seriously.

All of that is clear; what I can’t figure out is this wizened little preconscious cottage in Santa Monica. I strain to place myself inside its tantalizing history. What kind of little girl was I? Where were my secret places? Did I climb the beech tree? Who lived in the house next door? Memory does not respond. I sit there with my hands on the steering wheel, feeling numb.

The next thing I know I am driving up a street with tall pines and deep shade. Clearly when we lived here we lived on the modest end of the neighborhood; as the street numbers get bigger, so do the homes. By Twentieth Street the landscaping is lush, the flowers sumptuous, screaming orange-red bougainvillea flopping over white stucco walls. On every block gardening or construction work is being done by Hispanic men. Lunch trucks selling Mexican food cruise the area along with private Westec security patrols. I am concentrating on these details to avoid a growing feeling of sadness. I know it is coming from having seen that house, which I now wish I had avoided. I note a uniformed maid walking a dog and try to conjure up some cynicism but the sadness is there. Maybe I am confusing myself with Violeta’s children, it must be Teresa I am picturing huddled in the skirts of a starched dress in the scrawny marigolds beside my grandfather’s house, not me. Teresa alone and crying, not me.

•  •  •

The Eberhardts live in a two-story contemporary Mediterranean, bald and newly built. It has a red tile roof and two huge curved casement windows looking into the first-floor living room that echo the archway over an outsized door. A quarry tile walkway bends through a scruffy brown lawn; a few plants edge up against the off-white walls—except for a grouping of vigorous young birch trees, the place looks dry and neglected as if after paying a million and a half dollars the owners didn’t have the stamina to deal with landscaping. I guess to most people a million-and-a-half-dollar box with a few doodads is plenty.

Of course on this scale of house there is no doorbell—instead, a security system, with a square white button to push and a speaker to talk into.

“Yes?”

“Hello, my name is Ana Grey. I’m looking for Claire Eberhardt.” Since this is not government business I do not identify myself as a federal agent.

“This is she.”

“I’m a … friend … of Violeta Alvarado,” still speaking into the microphone. “Could I talk to you?”

Pause. “Violeta … doesn’t work here.”

I stifle the urge to say, Of course not, she’s dead. I am getting tired of talking to the wall.

“I know that. This will just take a minute, ma’am.”

“All right. Hang on.”

Silence. She’s coming. Which gives me the opportunity to study the front door—four feet wide and twice as tall as normal with a crescent-shaped window over the top, dark wood, mahogany maybe with some sort of finish intentionally scratched up. Just as I am wondering why anybody would need such a huge door, it opens.

She is holding a boy about two years old who is resting his head against her bare neck.

“Peter just woke up from a nap,” she explains, pivoting so I can see Peter’s flushed cheek and glossy eyes. They both have shiny black hair, so dark it almost has shades of eggplant purple, the boy’s in long loose curls, hers sticking out in all directions from a pink elastic band pushed up off the forehead as if she just wanted to get her bangs out of the way.

“I’m Claire.” She is wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and baggy turquoise cotton tights meant to hide a few extra pounds. Her breasts are loose. Even with the crazy hair and padded hips she is attractive in a reckless sexual way; but her looks are a neglected afterthought, as if it is enough that she’s made it from wherever she came from, she lives north of Montana. Although she seems as if she’s been napping along with her son, she is wearing strawberry-red lipstick. My first impression of Claire Eberhardt is that she is as unfinished as her house.

You’d expect her to take up the doorway with ownership and conviction, but instead she is backed up inside, curved around the child, unsure. She seems to be looking at me but away at the same time.

“Sorry to barge in on you, but it’s about Violeta Alvarado.”

“What about her?”

“Did Ms. Alvarado work here?”