3
The sky is bright and clear. The air is erased of all imperfection and smog. L.A. is ready for its close-up. Traffic down Crenshaw is easy, thank God, because I should have left twenty minutes ago. Okay, forty-five minutes ago, if I was going to be there at nine A.M. As it is, I’ll be there just before ten.
I live equidistant between two large boulevards that each have freeway entrances, so I am constantly deciding which one to take. The more westerly of the two, La Brea, is usually more crowded, since it is generally understood to be the last civilized stop off the 10 freeway for anyone to use, even though my neighborhood that Crenshaw leads you to is quite lovely—old homes, quiet streets, large trees (an anomaly in L.A.), with pockets of apartment buildings from the 1920s. But when giving directions to my apartment, I always suggest La Brea; people here get uneasy when told to use a freeway exit they never thought they’d have to.
I pull onto the 10 freeway and find a place among the westbound semirush. The vehicles in their lanes on each side of my truck remind me of customers on stools at a neighborhood bar. Everyone is perfectly spaced apart; all together, yet all alone. Until inevitably someone gets hit. But when that’s cleared up, what returns is a kind of massive hurtling forward while being lulled all at the same time. A perfect mind-numbing leave from life.
I love riding the 10 freeway, or the Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway, which is the official name posted on the big green sign welcoming you from Highway 1 where the 10 begins. Though I was out here a good year before I noticed that sign and learned the freeway’s real name. See, I grew up with the 10 in Pass Christian. Of course, down there it’s called the I-10, like some kind of personal rating statement, never the 10 freeway, but to me it was only one thing: the way out of Pass C. and to New Orleans—which is why I’ve always loved the 10. And I knew it kept traveling west, Houston and all that, but I never really thought about where it ended up until I got out here and realized it was the same one, just looking better cared for and with a different name. Like some burgeoning actress from the Midwest.
There is no sign, however, at the end of Highway 10 before it merges into Highway 1. No sign to make sure you knew the name of what you were riding on. Which I find very odd—as if the ability to keep on going makes up for the lack of a goodbye. But maybe that’s the whole point of L.A.
The street my sister lives on in Santa Monica is a few blocks from the beach, but in a canyon, so there is lots of privacy. It is easy not to know it exists, tucked out of sight the way it is, just past a deep curving slope. The street’s somnolence hits me as I drive toward her home. The houses appear hushed: most occupants are probably at work, and the few left behind are deeply engaged in some Monday-morning task that is meaningless except for its ability to kick-start another week.
A famous female folk singer from the seventies lives next door to Suzanne. I met her brother once years ago while he was staying with a friend of mine whom I used to run with every morning on the beach. My friend told me later who his sister was, and that explained why his frank blue eyes were curiously familiar, as if they had reprinted themselves off his sibling’s album covers from so long ago.
But I didn’t mention that to Suzanne last year when she showed me her new home and told me who all their neighbors were, going on at length about the folk singer. I was surprised that she knew so quickly who everyone was. I wondered if there was a list somewhere, a grand seating chart of the neighborhood that helped people choose their home so they weren’t stuck with the untoward, like a bad dinner companion, for life.
Suzanne opens her front door before I barely have my truck in park. I know she can distinguish its old American motor from all the new European ones roaming around especially since I’ve had it for years. I bought it because it was sturdy, cheap, and good to haul stuff around in. And because it reminds me of where I grew up. Not that Pass C. is filled with trucks, but it definitely is not filled with exorbitantly priced non-American sedans. Soon after I bought it, Suzanne told me that it makes me look like I am dating someone from the wrong side of the tracks and driving his truck—which made me love it even more.
My sister-the-bride is standing in the open doorway wearing a celadon-green silk sweater that plays up the same shade in her eyes and is light to the dark of her long, straight hair. That green has always been so perfect for her that I am unable to see a garment of that color without thinking she must already own it.
“Thank God you are here,” she says as I walk up the sidewalk. “Was traffic a nightmare?”
“You know.” I wave my hand back and forth. LA’s love-hate relationship with traffic at its finest: hate the annoyance; love the sins it hides.
Suzanne reaches her hands out in what I think will be a hug, so I lean forward to receive it, but she moves behind me, causing me to almost lose my balance, then takes each of my elbows in her hands, and steers me through her living room, which has morphed into a maze of nuptial adornments. She could have just led the way. Finally, we arrive at her couch and sit down.
Suzanne and her betrothed, Matt, live in an all-white home. The only color is a forest of ficus trees in front of the living room’s large arch-shaped window. With the wedding accoutrements squaring the already excessive amount of white, the effect is blinding. I stare down at my black pants for a moment to help my eyes adjust. It reminds me of when I was a kid and would go into the darkness of our daddy’s work shed from the summer sun outside. I loved the not being able to see at first, the standing there only able to take in the strong wood and sharp metal smells, as my new environment accommodated me to it before I could illicitly enjoy its loot.
“Okay. Question.” Suzanne’s slender hands sort through the alabaster objects overflowing on her coffee table. “I want to carry Mother’s prayer book, but I saw some lily of the valley that are just so perfect. Is it too much to carry both?” She holds up a small snowy tome. “Do they cancel each other out?”
“Oh, my God, the one from their wedding picture.” I have never seen the prayer book in real life, hadn’t even known it still existed, as if it might have intuitively combusted the minute our parents’ marriage went kaput. I take it from her hands. The gold ink spelling our mother’s maiden name is still crisp, the ivory leather pure except for a faint thumb mark on the back, like a print left behind on the safety rail of a sheer drop.
“Yes, that one.” Suzanne takes the coveted object back, puts it on her lap, and folds both hands on top of it.
“How’d you get it? I didn’t see it when we split her things up.”
“Yvette, I got Mother’s prayer book because I asked her for it.”
“After the accident?” My mind is frantically reconstructing our mother’s last days, trying to imagine a moment when a lucid conversation with Momma was possible, as she lay looking so unreachable in that hospital bed.
“No, God, I did not take a dying woman’s prayer book. Honestly. I asked her for it ages ago when I was twelve and she let me have it then. I knew I would carry it before you.”
“Oh.” My sister has always had a propensity for planning ahead that seems to me a particularly unfair trait when it involves items that other people (meaning me) are not even aware they should be thinking about. She is the only person I know whose material here-and-now is abundantly affected by decisions made very far in the past.
“Okay, so.” I try to push away the image in my mind of Momma handing Suzanne this book. The way Momma must have looked in 1977 when Suzanne was twelve and I was eight. Momma would have been wearing a crisp linen dress, no doubt, with small heels, just like any other normal day in her life, never imagining that in a little less than two decades, her life would brutally end. “What kind of flower?”
“Lily of the valley. They’re white.”
“Right, white.” I take the prayer book back, and as I turn it over in my hands, the coolness of the kid leather comforts me. It smells like Momma. That keen, rich scent that permeated the air when I was a child as she’d hold my face in her gloved hands to kiss me goodbye before she and Daddy went out to parties and balls.
“That would look great, Suzanne. Just a simple spray behind the book, even cascading over a little, but not covering the front.” I move one hand around in the air, trying to illustrate tiny flowers cascading down. Then another scent wave of Momma hits me, so I quickly give the volume back to Suzanne.
“Good, that’s what I thought, too.” She walks through the maze and puts the prayer book away in a cabinet drawer. I half expect her to lock it up and swallow the key. “You’re great with this stuff.”
“So are you.”
“Coffee?” Suzanne is already leaving the room. “And how’s my veil coming along? I need to see it soon, the wedding’s in just eight weeks, for God’s sake.”
“Great, it’s great, almost done. Just the detail work left on it now.”
I am secretly thrilled to be alone. The objects on her coffee table are astounding, the buried treasure of some dreadfully fabulous betrothal dream come to life: garters and albums and place cards and champagne flutes and a heart-shaped ring pillow with a smaller heart in the middle.
“It means a lot to me that you’re doing it,” Suzanne shouts from her kitchen, as I pick up the pillow to examine it. “If I’ve learned one thing from Matt’s family, it’s that they show up for each other, and I want you to hear that I really appreciate you showing up for me.”
I notice that “Suzanne” and “Matthew” are embroidered in cursive script on the white satin pillow next to ribbons that will hold their rings. I can’t tell if the “Suzanne” ribbon is for the wedding band that she will receive from Matt, or if it is for the ring she will give to him and thus be wed. I wonder if she wonders that as well, but probably she already knows.
I quickly flick the pillow back onto the table as she enters the room carrying our family’s grand and heavy silver coffee service, but easily, as if it were made of papier-maché.
“Sure, Suzanne, it’s not that big a deal.”
“It is to me, considering how we were raised.” Suzanne is using her “I am saying something loving that happens to be true, so don’t challenge me” tone. I suddenly feel exhausted.
“Okay, well, good.”
I push a mountain of tulle aside so she can set the loaded tray down. She has the same expression of determined politeness she had when we played tea party with our dolls as she pours my coffee and hands me the china cup.
“You know, Suzanne, our parents did show up for us—okay, fine, you’re right, not after Daddy disappeared and Momma wouldn’t leave her bedroom. But before that—the first fourteen years of my life and, hell, your first eighteen—they were good parents.” I can’t help myself. For years, I have felt like a portable tape recorder whose pause button my sister depressed during the last conversation we had about our parents when I was fourteen and I am sure that my words are picking right up where they left off. “Daddy used to take us to ball games with him, and all those trips to Grande Isle, remember the father-daughter days at school and the times he would—”
“I refuse to have this conversation,” Suzanne says, her eyes hard on mine before staring off in the mid-distance as if the sister I should be is there. “You either want to show up for me in my life today or you don’t.”
“No, I do. Jesus, I just…” Not understanding why we can’t talk about our parents, I want to scream. Considering that we are the only two people in L.A. who know them. Who know that they aren’t just “parents”—that amorphous, only-exist-as-psychological-factors-in-your-life stratum that everyone’s parents fall into out here because no one can actually meet them. Whenever I talk about my parents (to my friends or even that therapist I went to a couple of summers ago, right after Momma died, to help me with the grief), I can feel little parts of them getting cut away by the words I use (which is the worst part—the words I use) because they have different meanings to each person who hears them. The people my parents were—in the shadowy memories that hold together the love I have for them—don’t exist where I live. Sometimes I long to be in a place where they still do.
Suzanne is staring at me and my untouched coffee.
“I’m happy to be in your wedding.” I carefully push a lace garter aside and place my china cup on the table. I can’t have something so fragile in my hands right now; the way I feel is breakable enough.
“Good, I am, too.”
“Good. So.”
There is not one yellowed or dead leaf on any of my sister’s ficus trees or on the floor underneath. I understand this to mean that she has a maid.
“How are the anklets?”
It takes me a second to figure out what she’s talking about. Our mother thought anklets were trashy—hooker jewelry. Not that Momma ever would have used that word, but then she didn’t have to, with the expression she’d have on her face.
“You mean earrings, bracelets, rings, pins.” My sister is the director of a small foundation that helps children with AIDS, a fact I have never forgotten, so why she can’t remember what I make I have no idea. Talking about my designs with Suzanne is like watching the semiprecious stones and gold I use get transformed into colored glass and tinny aluminum. “It’s going great, actually.” I keep my tone light, refusing to let her see how pissed off her remark made me. “I’ve been getting new commissions, and at the gem show in Tucson, the prices were so much better, I was able to buy bigger stones, and, you know, size matters.”
I laugh; Suzanne does not. I had forgotten that since she got engaged, all sexual jokes have become verboten, as if the road to infidelity is paved with chuckles.
“Okay, so.” I move the tulle aside again to uncover my purse. “When am I seeing y’all?”
“This Saturday, three o’clock.” Suzanne gets up. Even though I am the one who started to leave, I immediately feel dismissed.
“Right.” I stand up in the gleaming, blinding whiteness of the room. She and Matt must walk around in here squinting at each other all the time, either that or wearing sunglasses. “Why’s Matt coming anyway? Won’t the ceiling of Bridal Tradition come crashing down on our heads?”
“It’s your dress we’re fitting, not mine.” Suzanne is walking me out through her immaculate nuptial labyrinth. “I want him included. Too many men feel left out of their wedding plans.” She opens the front door, stopping on the first step. “Our marriage is a partnership—we do things together.”
“Oh, well. That’s great,” I say with no enthusiasm at all. I have a sudden urge to run to her couch, throw myself on it, and demand to stay. Instead, I lean in to give her a hug. She moves forward, arms out wide, embracing more a force field than my body. I stare at my truck over her shoulder, willing it to pull me away from her.
“Okay, so.” I step out of her loose grasp. “See you then.”
“Bye. And bring my veil,” Suzanne says, and turning around, shuts her door.
The walk down the sidewalk is the exact opposite of the wedding processional in a church aisle: no family all around, no celebration, and no one waiting for me at the end.