After Her: A Novel Read online

  AFTER OUR FATHER LEFT, WE liked it better outside of our house than in. Inside, things kept breaking, options narrowed. Every month we seemed to have less of everything but unopened bills and the smell of cigarettes. Inside, we could feel the sadness and disappointment of our mother, and as much as we loved her, we had to get away or we’d be swallowed up in it too. But beyond the four walls of our falling-down house, anything was possible.

  We had a game called Ding Dong Ditch that required one of us—always Patty—to ring the doorbell of a house on our street. More often than not the door we’d choose was the one belonging to our next-door neighbor Helen.

  Once she rang the bell, Patty would hightail it to a ditch, or some spot behind a hedge, where I’d be waiting already, watching for the great moment when Helen (or Mr. Evans down the street, or the Pollacks, or Mrs. Gunnerson and her retarded daughter, Clara, if it had been their doorbells my sister rang) would open the door and look out at the empty doorstep with a baffled expression. (Not so baffled after a while, no doubt. Helen in particular had to know it was us, we rang her bell so frequently.)

  Sometimes we picked up rocks in the neighborhood—possibly decorative white rocks originally laid out as part of the edging for a flower bed—and painted them with poster paints, if we had some, or melted crayon wax if we didn’t. Then we sold them door-to-door, very possibly to the people whose houses they’d come from in the first place. We might get a nickel or just a penny. The idea was to save up the necessary funds to buy a Slurpee. Once we’d raised enough (probably just for one) we walked the mile and a half to the mall to buy it. Taking our time, as usual. There was nothing to rush home for.

  But our main diversions lay beyond the neighborhood, to the wilder places beyond it. Morning Glory Court backed up on the outer reaches of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which included a network of hiking trails so vast it stretched from the park’s southernmost borders in San Francisco to a spot almost fifty miles north of that known as Point Reyes. Beyond that lay the entire Pacific Ocean. More than anywhere else—the bedroom we shared, our messy kitchen with its frequently malfunctioning refrigerator and broken oven, or the houses we didn’t go to of the friends we didn’t have—the mountain was where my sister and I spent our days.

  For most children in our neighborhood, the vast expanse of open land abutting our houses had been off-limits, for fear of snakes or coyote attacks or, more likely, poison oak. But Patty and I rambled where we chose. Our only limits: how far our legs could carry us.

  Sometimes we’d make ourselves a picnic—those saltines again, and peanut butter, or possibly just sugar. We’d take it, along with whatever book I was reading or the notebooks I took everywhere to write stories in (and, for Patty, a stack of Betty and Veronicas), and then spend the day out on the mountain. We might make our way to the Mountain Home Inn, at the base of a major trailhead to the mountain, where (at my direction) Patty would race in, bearing no possible resemblance to the kind of person who’d be a registered guest, and fill her pockets with peanuts from the bar, then race out again before anyone could tell her not to.

  After, we might just sit there on the mountain, alongside the trail, or on a rock, splitting grass in two or imagining scenarios of things we’d do if one of us got on a game show and won ten thousand dollars, or (though this was my interest, not my sister’s) analyzing photographs of haircuts we liked, or John Travolta’s crotch in teen magazines.

  “You’d think someone as famous as him would be embarrassed to have his picture taken in pants that tight,” Patty said. “He has enough money to buy a new pair if he’s outgrown his old ones.”

  Some things I explained to her. Some not. At times we’d just lie there together not speaking at all, just breathing in the faint breeze carrying the smell of wild fennel, or we spit seeds to see whose went the farthest. We took our shirts off and lay in the grass, sun on our skin, checking for breast development. Mine negligible. Hers nonexistent.

  Other times we hung out in an old rusted-out truck body abandoned on the hillside, with weeds growing up through the middle, whose presence in this spot formed the basis for endless speculation. We liked to believe we were the only ones who knew about the truck body, though once, when we settled into our spot there, we found a couple of old condom wrappers that suggested this was not so.

  The truck body sat about a mile up the hillside from our house, tucked away off the trail. A little way beyond lay an outdoor amphitheater where, every summer, a local semiprofessional theater company staged a lavish production of some popular musical (The Sound of Music one year, Brigadoon the next), accessible only on foot. The cost of tickets for the Mountain Play exceeded anything our mother could have come up with, but during the period of weeks every summer when performances took place, we sometimes hiked up to the amphitheater. We had located a spot close enough to the actual performance site where we could spread out a blanket, listening to the music and observing the actors hanging around during rehearsals—changing costumes, smoking pot, necking, possibly—which was more interesting than the actual show.

  Guys and Dolls had been our favorite. Patty and I had never actually gotten to see the show, but over the course of the weeks they’d performed it a few summers back, we’d gotten so familiar with the songs that from our post a little ways off, we sang along with them: “I Got the Horse Right Here,” “Luck Be a Lady Tonight,” “Take Back Your Mink.”

  Even better were the times when no rehearsal was going on, and the two of us could occupy the performance space ourselves, putting on our own shows. Shy as she was out in the world, up on the mountain with nobody seeing her but me and the occasional red-tailed hawk or deer, my sister was fearless. One time when she was seven or eight, out there in the amphitheater—against a backdrop meant to be the main street for The Music Man—she performed a complete and glorious striptease.

  “We’re like the kids in Charlie Brown,” Patty said. Had anybody, reading that strip, ever seen those children’s parents getting in the way of their adventures? From how it seemed in the comics, they carried on their lives without the least evidence of adult intervention.

  I had read a book once about a boy who got lost in the forest, and some wolves found him and took care of him. (It would be a boy, of course, who got to have an adventure like that.) Still, I loved that story. I saw us running free over the hillside, unencumbered by parental rules or concern for danger. We were a couple of wolf girls—but with fashionable jeans, though really what we wore were just Levi’s.

  WE RODE OUR BIKES A lot. No destination in mind. But you never knew what you might find. Once, riding around, we’d passed a Dumpster with a bunch of records stacked up next to it—someone’s entire record collection from the looks of it, and not things like Mitch Miller or Mantovani either, or Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, which was the kind of music our neighbor Helen favored, or Jennifer Pollack’s favorite, which we could hear out the Pollacks’ window all day long, the Carpenters.

  For some unfathomable reason (though, as a girl who liked to make up stories, I invented a few scenarios concerning what had brought this about) someone out there had chosen to throw out his or her entire album collection. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, of course. Also Black Sabbath and the Moody Blues, Procol Harum and Led Zeppelin, along with folkier types of music too—Cat Stevens and Linda Ronstadt, Leonard Cohen, Arlo Guthrie and Judy Collins, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Simon and Garfunkel. There was one unlikely component in the mix that Patty in particular loved: an album by Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner called Burning the Midnight Oil. It had two side-by-side images on the cover: one of Dolly, sitting by a fireplace, bursting out of an amazing red gown, with a heartbroken look on her face; the other of Porter, in a rhinestone shirt, raking his fingers through his yellow hair, looking equally devastated. My sister loved Led Zeppelin and Cream, but after finding that album, Dolly Parton became Patty’s favorite singer of all time.

  There were way too many records to fit in o
ur bike baskets. We hid part of the stash, in case someone else came along and took them before we could get back for the next load. It took us three trips getting the whole collection home, and for the rest of that summer, our main activity was playing music on my tinny little monaural record player from when I was little, decorated with old Disney characters.

  We memorized the whole of Alice’s Restaurant and sang “City of New Orleans” and “American Pie” now as we rode our bikes. “This’ll be the day that I die, this’ll be the day that I die.”

  We loved how Leonard Cohen sang “Suzanne,” and though the words made no sense, we could tell it was a sexy song. We loved Donovan. We actually wore out the Crosby, Stills and Nash album with “Suite for Judy Blue Eyes.” We turned the volume up to the loudest it could go for “Whole Lotta Love,” but we liked more gentle music too. We knew Jim Croce had died young, tragically, which seemed to make it even sadder listening to the song about trying to call up his old girlfriend but he can’t read her telephone number on the matchbook where he wrote it down. If there was one thing we loved about a piece of music, it was the presence of heartbreak, or better yet, tragedy.

  “Every time I hear that song, I keep hoping he’ll finally figure out the number and get another dime,” said Patty. “You know if he did, they’d be together.”

  One time, after we first brought home those records, I had asked our mother what kind of music she’d loved when she was young, and for a second, a look came over her I’d never seen before. “There was never anyone to equal Elvis,” she said. “But I’m over him.”

  It wasn’t only Elvis she’d gotten over, but every man. After our father left, it was as if she’d drawn the curtains, and all she wanted was to be left alone, with as little opportunity for loss or sorrow as possible.

  WE WERE WANDERING ON THE mountain one time—a little higher up, farther from home than usual—when we saw an amazing sight: a man and a woman running through the grass, totally naked.

  We hung back, not wanting to embarrass them, but the woman waved in our direction. The two of them walked over to us, laughing—still without their clothes on, but acting as if there was nothing unusual about this. We tried hard not to look down, at the man in particular. Though neither of these people seemed even close to shy.

  “Beautiful day,” the woman said. “Can you believe these wildflowers?”

  It was the season for California poppies. They were everywhere, like something you’d see on a postcard, though if this was a postcard, the naked people wouldn’t have been part of it.

  They held hands and walked off. Patty and I didn’t say anything, even to each other. We knew each other so well that even when something amazing happened, there was no need to speak. We just burst out laughing and held hands, running back down the hillside so fast we almost fell over ourselves.

  One time we met a man playing a guitar and singing, with a long-haired woman with a baby on the grass beside him.

  “I think that was Jerry Garcia,” I told my sister. I had to tell her who that was, before she got impressed, and even then, not all that much.

  We were in the middle of some game one time—Charlie’s Angels, maybe, or just drifting along, as we often did, snapping the heads of timothy grass while reciting “Momma had a baby and her head popped off”—when we came upon The Thing. Patty spotted it first: the weird, hairless body of a small unborn animal—a deer fetus probably, still in the sac, with its spindle legs folded into itself and shut eyes with their translucent lids that were never going to open, ears flat against the skull, a map of blue veins threading just beneath the skin. Somewhere not far from this spot, we imagined a deer mother wandering, bloody and dazed. Within hours, you knew, the vultures or coyotes would have found the body of the doe. Tomorrow it would be gone without a trace.

  Sometimes we pretended we were a couple of Indian maidens, the lone survivors of a slaughtered tribe, who roamed the foothills of some vast mountain range by day, trapping our food and hunting game, returning to our teepee only at night to eat our cornmeal mush and gnaw on a little pemmican, wrap our threadbare blankets around our rawhide shifts before another sunrise sent us back out onto the range. I wanted to light a campfire and throw popcorn kernels in to watch them pop, but Patty wouldn’t go along with it. Fire made my sister nervous. The only thing that did.

  There were a couple of horses on the hillside. They must have belonged to someone, but they just grazed there, so we could pretend they were ours. Sometimes we brought them carrots, if we had enough at home. We gave them names—Crystal and Pamela, because those were the names we wished we were called. They seemed to know us after a while, letting us come up alongside them, stroking their backs. With Crystal, especially, you could almost imagine riding her bareback, if there had been a way to get up on her, which there was not.

  We played we were blind people, with our eyes shut, turning in circles five times, then walking fifty steps to see where we’d end up. We’d open to a random page of My Secret Garden (a book I’d seen in the bedroom at the house of our neighbors, the Pollacks, one night when I was babysitting, full of wild stories women had made up about sex, that I’d snuck home in my book bag) and read it out loud to each other. We pretended we were boys and peed standing up.

  For us, back then, it was exciting enough, just speaking certain words out loud. Each of us assembled a pile of pulled-up grass or dandelions in front of ourselves and when it was our turn, we’d have to think up some forbidden word—tossing some of our grass in the air as we uttered it, though for us the list was frustratingly short because our vocabulary concerning the language of sex was limited: Intercourse, naturally. Butt. Nipple. Vagina. Penis. And the one that had become, for me that year, the scariest. Period.

  Twice, in our rambles on the mountain, we came upon a couple making love in the grass—though on neither occasion did they see us. From years of playing detective, we’d gotten good at being stealthy, though later—safely home—we couldn’t stop laughing.

  You might have thought some of our experiences would have discouraged further exploration, but it was just the opposite. The mountain opened up for us the picture of a bigger world than what we ever could have known in the safe confines of our tiny house and yard, and the fact that this other world had dead animals in it, and naked people, and predators, just made us want to discover more.

  The days stretched out, one after another, vast and unbroken as the grassy landscape of that hillside and the darkening sky overhead. Other kids had to go inside at dinnertime. We’d hear their mothers calling to them, though often they knew, without being called, when it was time to head in. For us, there was never anyone calling, and no worry or guilt that our mother had worked all afternoon to make a steaming family dinner now left to cool on the table. Dinner was whatever cold cuts we located in the refrigerator, whenever we got home to eat them.

  Going back outside after we ate, we might stay out until ten o’clock, just making up stories or prowling behind the houses, looking in windows to see if anything interesting was happening, which it never was. When we let ourselves back in, we’d hear our mother’s radio in her bedroom and smell her cigarette smoke, call out “Good night, Mom,” and head into our own room, where we’d set a stack of records on the record player. We’d lie on our beds and read out loud to each other—from a joke book, possibly, or one of the biographies I got from Scholastic Book Club, or another one of the wild stories from My Secret Garden (though these mostly baffled my sister)—and whisper to each other until one of us fell asleep. Usually Patty.

  With the window open, you could hear the sound of crickets, or an owl, or a coyote howling, and on rare occasions, a mountain lion. You could look out to the mountain and see stars, and when the light came in the morning, there were the horses grazing—horses mating even—and hawks circling overhead.

  It was the place we found out about everything, that mountain. Animal bones and deer scat. Birds, flowers, condoms. The bodies of dead animals, the bodies o
f men. Rocks and lizards. Sex and death.

  Chapter Four

  Some years before—when I was around ten, Patty eight—an old woman who lived in a house on the cul-de-sac at the far end of our street died following a long illness, and her husband moved to a nursing home. Their house sat vacant for close to a year while their children worked out what to do about the place. Then sometime in the spring the house had been sold. All we knew about the new residents was the name on the mailbox, Armitage.

  They had no children. Over the months we’d become vaguely aware of Mr. Armitage—a man of stocky build and thinning hair, who evidently worked (this much we learned from Mrs. Gunnerson) as a teacher at a ballroom dancing studio in San Rafael. We saw him walking to the bus stop a few blocks away most afternoons and returning home around nine o’clock at night. Later, when hardly anyone was out but us, he’d walk their small dog.

  On rare occasions—only at night, if we were out later than normal—we’d see the woman we determined to be Mrs. Armitage carrying a large pocketbook and wearing some unbecoming dress over her shapeless body, and (a little strangely) a hat, regardless of the weather. She always wore high heels, as if she was headed someplace special, though from the looks of things, her walks around the neighborhood with their little dog—a mutt who seemed to have some Jack Russell terrier in him—took her to no particular destination. Other than those times—no more than three of them—we never saw her, and because the hat featured an odd little veil in the front, we never got to see her very closely either.