The Patron Saint of Liars (3 page)

I left her in the bathroom and went into the closet, turned on the light, and shut the door. There was a full-length mirror inside and I wanted a minute to look at myself without my mother watching me. What would she say if she saw me coming to her counter? Would she run her fingers along the sides of my face as I had seen her do to other women and tell me what could be done about the shape of my mouth or the length of my nose? And would I think what all those other women must think, that no matter how beautiful she made me, I would never be as beautiful as her?

"I'm going to wear your blue dress," I called out through the door.

"Sure," my mother said, "that'll look good."

I pulled the dress on over my head, and for a minute I thought about staying. Locking the door from the inside for no good reason other than I couldn't remember for a second what Thomas Clinton looked like. But then I did.

It was a night that at nineteen, in southern California in May, was like every other night you had seen so far, but a night that when you remember it years later in a place without an ocean, is like a powerful dream. Everywhere you went you heard the water, the same way you had always heard your breathing, and would later hear the highway, or trains, or women's voices. But the sound was so much a part of everything that you couldn't hear it at all then. This is what I took for granted: The sound of the water. The light on the water, day or night. The way you could look out for so long you couldn't tell the difference between the water and the sky. The sand that blew onto the highway in sheets and formed small dunes against the curbs. The smell of the water. The tough grass that grew from nothing. The soft, hot tar and the birds which never occurred to me would not be everywhere I went. I am saying this from memory and there are things I am forgetting. But I remember this: I wore that blue dress of my mother's which was spotted with holly leaves because I knew that when the wind caught it and blew it back, the skirt would press against my legs and be as big as a sail. I knew we would walk along the beach that night and he would have to remember the sight of me in that dress. I wore it because he went to college, and I liked the way he had to keep looking away from my face when he spoke to me. I knew that dress would break his heart.

Thomas Clinton was about my height, but there was a lightness to him, the size of his bones, the width of his shoulders, that made him seem smaller. Everything about him made me think he had been born late, that he would have been better off being his father, or my father. I could imagine him in a wide-brimmed felt hat, a newspaper folded beneath his arm. I could see him gladly giving up his seat on the bus to anyone who seemed to want it.

He picked me up in a blue Dodge Dart with wide bench seats. My mother and I didn't have a car, and to ride in one was always an occasion. I rolled down the window and leaned my face into the night air while he drove me to dinner in silence. The streets were wide and lined with small houses, every one of them exactly alike except for some small thing: a hedge around the front, a bay window, a garage. They were painted in sherbet colors, pale orange or pink, a creamy yellow. The lawns and the sidewalks made heat lines. You could count on everything being just so. I looked at a house and then closed my eyes for a minute. When I opened them again, I would see the same house, a full block away. It was a game I liked to play whenever I was in a car, especially when I was in a car with a date who had nothing to say.

Words came hard to Thomas Clinton. He managed to tell me before our dinner arrived that he was studying to be a math teacher. He would have been better, 1 think, drawing equations on napkins to show me how he felt. What percentage of his heart he had given to me already, as opposed to percentages given to his family, his work. He was fluid in numbers, he could explain them, but in an Italian restaurant, pushing a veal cutlet from side to side on his plate, he was lost. It was not a romantic place, where long silences are full of meaning. It was bright and clean and the waitresses wore uniforms that made them look like nurses. Our waitress came by too often because it was late and all her other tables had paid up and gone.

"Don't you like that?" she said to Thomas, pointing at his dinner. "If something's wrong, you'd tell me, right?" She was a woman in her early fifties, whose bright blond hair looked like candy spun onto her head.

"It's fine," he said, and cut again at the meat. "It's good."

"Well, I hope so. Your girlfriend liked hers. Look, she's almost finished." She leaned over toward me, like she wanted to tell secrets. "The cheesecake is good," she said. "You're skinny, you can eat cheesecake. If you have the room, you should think about it."

There was something about the way she talked, her easy manner, that made our silence singularly unbearable. "I'll just have coffee," I said.

"That's why you can eat cheesecake," she said, and sighed. "Because you don't. That's the way it works."

As soon as she had gone I wanted her to come back. I was no stranger to first dates, to their special kinds of horrors, but the ones I'd had tended to talk more often than not, to try and make an impression any way possible.

"I know you work at Simms," Thomas said finally, his eyes fixed down. Our plates had been taken away, but the waitress had insisted on bringing him his dinner packaged up, even though he'd said he didn't want it.

"You might not want it now," she said, leaving the folded white sack on the table between us, "but tomorrow for lunch, you'll want it."

"I work at Simms," I said. "I schedule deliveries."

"I know because I saw you once, going into the building in the morning. I drove past you." He stopped and I waited, thinking there had to be something more.

"And you knew me from church?"

He nodded. "I've seen you at church. You go with someone."

"My mother."

"Your mother," he said. "I thought it was probably your mother."

I looked out the window because I was afraid I would embarrass him if I looked at him too long. I felt genuinely bad for him, not angry or bored the way I did with so many of the others. I wished I had an idea what to say myself, but somehow the tone had been set; the passage of words would be difficult between us. "I think I'd like to take a walk," I told the window.

So he paid the check while I waited by the door and the waitress said good night and then came after us in the street to give Thomas the sack of cutlets he had left on the table. "You two look real cute," she said. "You have a good night."

I was right about the wind, but by then I was sorry about the way it made my dress into a flag that waved behind us. It was a dark night, and darker as we walked across the highway and down toward Imperial Beach, and I was hoping he wouldn't notice it. There was only a little light on the waves, no stars. As hot as the day had been, it had cooled off, and I could smell the smell that wasn't exactly sand or salt or water, but all three together. When we stopped I put my hand on Thomas Clinton's shoulder to balance myself and take my sandals off, and I felt him tense, almost as if 1 startled him, as if he had forgotten I was there, but when I pulled away he put his hand over mine and held it there near the collar of his shirt. We stayed there, just like that. There was something about the gesture, which was so strange and unexpected, that I think I would have just stood there all night.

"I knew it was your mother you went to church with," he said finally. He was facing the water. His voice was low so I had to lean in to hear him over the sound of the waves. I didn't ask him to speak up. I knew if he stopped talking he'd never be able to start again.

"I knew it was your mother and I knew where you worked and I knew where you lived. I drove behind you one morning, all the way from your house to Simms."

I looked at him, thinking it had to be a joke but then knowing for sure it wasn't. The wind was high and it pushed the sand around. It threw my dress out straight behind me. "More than one morning," he added quietly. "Don't think I'm crazy, I'm not. My God, there is nothing crazy about me. It's something about you, Rose. When I saw you in church. I saw the way you put your forehead on your hands when you're kneeling there." He ran his fingers along my fingers. His hand was shaking. "I would sit right behind you. The back of your neck. The back of your dress." He pressed my hand into his shoulder, but he wouldn't look at me. "Every week I thought I would talk to you and then I finally did. And tonight. All night I just sat there and in my mind I was telling you everything. Things I had thought. It's been seven months. You'll think I'm crazy, but I couldn't not tell you this."

My heart was beating so fast and all I could think of was, fast as his. My heart is beating as fast as his.

"I had to wait until the thought of not telling you was worse than the thought of telling you. Does that make sense? Once I saw you eating lunch by yourself. It wasn't too far from here. I hadn't even been looking for you but you were there. I used to think if I just had your picture that would be enough. Then I could look at your face. Your beautiful face."

He stopped and drew in his breath. He was still watching the ocean. The waves were high from the wind. They were as black as the night was black, the same way they had been blue like the sky that afternoon. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness and I could see him. He wore small wire glasses and had pale hair. He was handsome. I hadn't really thought about it before. I remember I started to cry, though I'm not sure why anymore. Maybe it was just that I had waited such a long time to hear someone say those things to me. It was romantic. What a thought, to be nineteen and be willing to give up everything in your life because someone says something to you on a dark beach that sounds romantic.

He didn't make a move toward me, and somehow that made it all the more spectacular. All those boys I'd turned away, all those boys who when they kissed me slipped my blouse out of the back of my skirt and tried to run their hands along my stomach. All the boys who said what they wanted, told me my breasts, my neck, the sides of my legs. I was stronger than all of them. I could twist myself away and walk into the water, demand that they take me home, or take myself home. But I didn't know until that night how they must have felt, wanting to press the side of their face against my breast bone and hold me. The comfort that would come from that, and I gave them so little. It was dark and Thomas Clinton could have been anyone, but I thought he knew me like God knew me. The longer we stood there in silence, my hand caught between his hand and shoulder, the more my memory set about improving his words, until they churned through my stomach and over my chest, spreading down through my arms and legs like my own blood. It was my own blood. The plainest form of nineteen-year-old sexual desire on a dark beach of the Pacific Ocean in southern California in May. And I knew so little that I took it to be a sign from God.

I faced him, pressed in chest to chest, bent his neck down with my hand, covered my mouth with his mouth, moved his hand down my back, pressed in like I was trying to pass through him, my whole body through his. I stood on one foot and wrapped my other leg behind his. I knew from every time I'd stopped before what the other body wanted from me. My hand raking up hard from the nape of his neck to the crown of his head, then down, inside the collar of his shirt, then back between us, working down the front of my dress until my arms came out of the sleeves and went back to his waist. Where was he? God help me, I don't remember him, not until the point he held my arms and pushed me back. Held me there and looked at me, and when he was afraid and couldn't look again he folded me back into my clothes and buttoned my dress and looked for the two buttons that were gone but couldn't find them in the dark, in the sand. He picked up the white sack with his dinner which had fallen from his hand and brushed the hair out of my face and took my hand and led me back to the car. He drove me home without saying a word and walked me to my door and didn't kiss me good night. He called me the next night for a date and the night after that and the night after that. He married me at the end of the summer in Our Lady of Lourdes and Father O'Donnell said the mass and his parents and his two sisters came down from Victorville and we moved into the married students' apartments and my mother cried but did so quietly in the kitchen while I took out the last of the boxes, and the next year he got a job teaching math in a high school in Marina del Rey. That is everything. That is all there was to know.

2

M
Y MOTHER
knew how to drive but didn't. She said she'd forgotten. She'd forgotten how to ride in a car as well. She would walk everyplace she possibly could. If it was raining, she would wear jeans and a sweatshirt, wrap her work dress in a dry cleaner's bag, and put it in with her shoes and purse in one of the large, plastic I. Magnin's bags we kept stacked beneath the kitchen sink. If she had to go someplace far from home she took the bus, but she didn't like to. She said it was dirty and crowded and she didn't like to sit next to strangers. If there was an emergency, a terrible emergency, she would call a cab or Mr. Lipton, the superintendent of the building, to come and drive her. She did the night I was five years old and my eardrum burst. She did when I was fourteen and ran a fever so high I couldn't tell her who she was, even though she asked me over and over again. They took my appendix out, and when I was well Mr. Lipton drove me home, but Mother walked, because going home was not an emergency.

It's no great mystery. It was because my father had died in a car. But he didn't die in a car. He died later, in the hospital, which is the thing that makes the story tragic instead of just very sad. The car got away from him somehow, forgot gravity despite its weight, and flipped three times before digging itself into a sidewalk where no one was walking. His spine was nothing but dust. "Bone dust," my cousin told me secretly in the back yard of my uncle's house when I was seven. He was the one who gave me the details. I never got them from my mother, I never asked. It took him five weeks in intensive care to finish what had been started. It was there my father died of pneumonia, which, from what I understand, is like drowning.