Wildwood (18 page)
Authors: Drusilla Campbell
“You’ll break my heart if you grow a housemaid’s hump, Liz.” The torchlight flared red in Teddy’s eyes. “Spoil that lovely back.”
The way Teddy looked at her made Liz’s skin pucker, but she acknowledged his compliment with a polite smile. For a moment, no one said anything. She glanced at Jeanne who had gone over to sit on the wall beside Dan. If she heard Teddy or cared what he said, she wasn’t letting on.
“What about Gerard?” Mindy Ryder’s slanted eyes glittered. “What’s he do? I just want to get a picture of the kind of life you’ve got down there. I mean, hell, I’m fifty plus and the farthest away I’ve been is Acapulco.”
“That’s a crime,” Gail said. “We flew over to London for a week; easier than driving down to L.A.”
“Gerard helps when he can, but he’s often gone for weeks in the field.” Liz wanted to bring Gerard alive for these old friends. She could tell them: He knows the name of ten thousand tropical plants, in Latin and English, bird calls too and the history of trees. “He’s a consultant to the Minister for Environmental Affairs. His specialty is rain forest management and since Belize has one of the last undamaged forests in the world and the government wants to keep it that way . . .” She didn’t describe Gerard. She delivered a prose rendition of his résumé. “He’s devoted to his work.”
Teddy chuckled. “I thought you went in for the artistic type.”
“Managing a whole goddamn forest sounds like an art to me.” Mindy said and winked at Liz.
“We should get him up here to tell us what to do about that damn creek.” Gail nodded behind her toward Bluegang. “Did Hannah tell you there’s a committee—”
“I can’t even manage my own life,” Mindy said. “Let alone an ecosystem.”
“And speaking of your life, how is that girl of yours?” Gail grinned. “Tell us her name.”
Mindy sighed. “You know her name, Gail.”
“Balthazara!” Gail rolled off on wheels of laughter.
Mindy shook her head and her embroidered shawl slipped a little, revealing plump, tanned and freckled shoulders. “What can I say? She was born in nineteen-sixty-nine. If she’d been a boy I was going to call her Pax. I’m nothing if not a child of my times.”
“When’s her baby due?” Hannah asked.
Babies. Fifty years old and we’re always talking about babies.
“Six weeks.”
“Lucky you,” Hannah said, “to be a grandmother.”
Liz shifted in her chair. The waistband of her slacks cut into her skin. She felt hugely fat with breasts like Dolly Parton. Why had no one noticed?
Because they don’t really see me, she thought. Not even Jeanne and Hannah see the person I really am. They see Liz Shepherd the wild girl in shabby clothes and her hair in tangles because her mother never took the time to notice her. Given enough time these people, out of their affection and concern and totally without thinking, would shove her back into the box that had confined her when she was young. She didn’t know if she would have the strength to resist and declare:
Look at me. See me. This is me now.
Look at me. See me. This is me now.
Of course she wouldn’t. That was why she had left Rinconada and returned infrequently and was always glad to leave at the end of a week or ten days. She recalled a visit long ago to the La Brea Tar Pits and saw herself, stuck solid in the mud of time. It could have happened to her so easily. How fortunate she had been in her compulsion to escape.
Mario was speaking to her. “You gotta come in and see the new deli, Lizzie.” His handsome features had coarsened and mousse or spray held his gray-streaked comber in place; but her nickname buzzed on his lips and she felt a little of the old electric charge. “I’ll give you the grand tour. Let you taste the prosciutto straight from Italy.”
“Twenty-two-fifty a pound,” Gail said. “Make sure it’s a very small taste.”
“We had some good times, huh, Lizzie?”
Gail poked him. “Spare us the trip down memory lane, Mario. You’re a middle-aged man with four grown children, remember. A grandfather.” Gail walked over to the drinks table next to the doors into the dining room. She refilled her glass with chilled white wine. “I was going to bring their pictures, Liz, but
he
wouldn’t let me. He made me promise I wouldn’t go on about being a grandmother. He prefers you remember him as the Rinconada Wildcats’ running quarterback, the dago with the dynamite smile.”
he
wouldn’t let me. He made me promise I wouldn’t go on about being a grandmother. He prefers you remember him as the Rinconada Wildcats’ running quarterback, the dago with the dynamite smile.”
Teddy told a story about a boy at Hilltop, something about an imaginary football player. As he talked Liz watched Hannah. She sat with her elbows on the arms of her chair, her fingertips together, drumming gently on her lower lip. Impatient, bored or deep in thought, Liz couldn’t tell. Now that the party was established, she seemed less present and to have retreated, content to let her guests take care of themselves. Dan watched her too. Liz couldn’t read his expression and that worried her.
Conversation ambled on and none of it was important. The air grew chill and the fragrance of the creek and wildwood more intense. Not unpleasant, simply there, alive.
At the dinner table set with linen and china and ornate old silverware, Hannah ladled curried carrot soup from a tureen decorated with orange flowers and spoke down the table to Mindy, seated on Dan’s right. “We were going to eat Italian, Mindy, but Mario’d run out of your ravioli. Sharon Bell says you make the best pasta she’s ever tasted.”
“And she bakes all my biscotti,” Mario said. “I could sell twice as much only she’s so lazy.”
Hannah said to Liz, “Mindy’s a caterer when she isn’t at the clinic. Where do you get your energy?”
“Drugs,” Mindy said. They all knew she had a long history with cocaine but had not used it in years.
Teddy raised his glass. “Let’s hear it for drugs.”
“Are you still working at that horrible place?” Gail asked. “You could make so much more . . .”
“Gail, it’s not about money. The kids at the center, they’re in bad shape when they come to me, really bad. They need me.”
“You always were such a good Catholic,” Gail said, her mouth prissy from the put-down.
“What’s being Catholic got to do with it?” Jeanne’s dark eyes glistened and she enunciated every word a little too carefully. She rocked her wineglass on its round base. Liz watched the Fumé Blanc slosh up one side and then the other. “Mindy’s right. It’s good work.”
“I guess I’m just not into good deeds,” Gail said.
Everyone laughed at this.
“We love you even if you are a selfish bitch,” Mindy said and blew her a kiss.
Gail blushed, looking pleased. Then she waved her hand, brushing off the subject. “Don’t you think it’s weird how our lives have turned out? I mean, there you are Mindy, you could have been a great artist—or a great caterer—and instead you babysit crazy kids.”
“You were going to be a movie star,” Mario reminded her.
Gail fluffed her hair. “I make as much money as a movie star.”
The table groaned and laughed and groaned.
“Well? It’s true.” It didn’t matter how it came to her, Gail loved attention. “We all thought Hannah would be someone wonderful, like Mother Teresa.”
“And instead she’s wonderful like Hannah.” Jeanne raised her glass in a toast.
“Here, here,” Mario said and did the same. They all toasted Hannah.
Except Gail, who was on a roll. “And as for you, Jeanne,” Gail pointed a finger, “I would have guessed you’d end up being a judge or an astronaut. Maybe governor. You were absolutely the smartest person I ever knew.”
Jeanne smiled delicately, but Liz wasn’t sure she was even following the conversation until talk turned to education and Hilltop School and she became animated and pedantic. Watching Jeanne, Liz felt embarrassed for her. Drunk, boring, repetitive. She had always been a little afraid of Jeanne and probably Hannah was too, but her certainty and confidence and control-taking were just a con, a cover-up. To hide what? It was astonishing how little Liz really knew about her best friends. As they had stuck her in a box from childhood, she had done the same to them.
The conversation moved from educating children to raising them. Teenagers in particular. A chill rose through Liz’s bones when she thought of the tiny thing inside her grown to a blossoming teenager.
“Meet my mommy. She’s seventy.”
Jeanne and Hannah cleared the soup bowls and brought in the chicken curry, bowls of rice and trays of condiments.
Mindy sampled the chutney. “Mango. And spicy. Wow.”
“It’s a hot flash,” Teddy said. “Jeanne wakes me up when she has them.”
“I do not.” Jeanne blushed. “Once I did. Maybe twice.”
The women at the table laughed, even Liz who wasn’t sure she’d ever had a hot flash. Jeanne’s hair had come undone on one side and she kept pushing it out of her eyes with the back of her hand. Liz felt a rush of concern.
Gail leaped to her next topic. “I’ve got a proposition for you, Dan.” If the rest of them wore duct tape over their mouths would she just keep on talking, assuming they all wanted to listen? “When you’re ready to sell this wonderful house, just say the word. I could move it in a minute.”
“Never,” said Dan.
Teddy said, “If you keep making money, Gail, I’m going to get you to endow something at the school.”
Jeanne flashed him a poisonous look. Liz looked down the table at Hannah to see if she noticed. She was folding her napkin, pressing the folds with the edge of her index fingernail. Her rice and curry were untouched.
“When Ingrid and Eddie are off in school or married, you’re going to be like ants in a paper bag.”
“Gail, you have a gift for language,” Teddy said and raised his glass again in mocking toast.
He was loaded too. Was that how they tolerated their marriage?
“Maybe we’ll have another baby,” Hannah said without looking up from the napkin she was carefully pressing.
“Omigod, at your age!” Gail’s eyes became slits when she laughed. “What a nightmare.”
Are you in there, little creature? Hear what she calls you?
Gail said, “Seriously, here’s something that’ll interest you, Hannah. I got a new listing today, that little old Victorian next to the house where you grew up. Down on Casabella flats? A coat of paint and some yard work and it goes on the block for a half million minimum.”
“Mrs. Phillips’s place,” Jeanne said and looked across the table at Liz. Shadows circled her eyes and the light within them was like something glimpsed at the bottom of a hole. “She was a cook at the school when I was a kid.”
“You should have seen the place when we went in. It was like something in a Hitchcock movie. It hadn’t been cleaned in years and inside there were cardboard boxes everywhere all filled with old sheet music and newspapers and magazines. The only clean room in the whole place was the boy’s. Billy’s. Remember him? Sort of weird, maybe retarded? The old lady kept his room like it was before he died.” Gail took a mouthful of curry and kept talking. “There was his pitiful little room with this blue chenille bedspread and a shelf with his little metal cars all lined up like gridlock and no dust on them anywhere. She’d even left his calendar on the wall. I walked in that room and there was Joe DiMaggio staring down at me.”
“I remember him,” Mindy said. “He died near here didn’t he? Down at the creek?”
“DiMaggio died at Bluegang?”
“Shut up, Teddy,” Mindy said.
“Someone died at the creek?” Dan asked. “You never told me about this, Hannah.”
Hannah shrugged her shoulders. “I guess it never came up.”
Mario spooned a fresh helping from the rice bowl.
Gail said, “That stuff’s got calories, you know.”
Mario said, “Liz and Jeanne and Hannah and me were all in Mrs. English’s class when it happened.”
“Not to mention your future wife,” Gail said. “I got the attendance prize that year.”
“Billy was older’n us,” Mario said. He turned to the other men at the table. “You guys don’t know this story? Dan? Teddy?”
They shook their heads.
“There was this boy, like Gail said, he was retarded. About the same age as your Eddie, Dan. We all knew him.”
“Creepy,” Gail said.
“Do we have to talk about this?” Hannah asked.
Dan said, “I want to hear the story.”
Hannah looked at Liz and then quickly away.
“I remember my dad and his brothers talking about it. Uncle Delio and Uncle Leonard were both on the police force.”
“Back then,” Mindy said, “they
were
the police force.”
were
the police force.”
“I wanted to be a cop too, so I’d hang around the dinner table and listen to their war stories . . .”
Teddy laughed. “Cops in Rinconada with war stories?”
“What happened was, this kid Billy Phillips apparently fell down the hill at Bluegang and hit his head on the boulders. Some boys found his body the next morning.”
“Is this why you’re always after me about a new fence, Jeanne?” Teddy asked.
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