"Nothing. She's just been acting funny lately."
Shooting stars hurled themselves into the empty places, burned up. Just for the pleasure of it. Just like this. I could have swallowed the night whole.
Ray toked too hard, coughed, spat. "Must be hard on her, getting older, pretty girls coming up in the same house."
I gazed up as if I hadn't heard, but what I was thinking was, tell me more about the pretty girls. I was embarrassed for wanting it, it was base, what did pretty matter? I had thought that so many times with my mother. A person didn't need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn't help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I'd take it.
"She still looks good," I said, thinking that it wouldn't be so hard on her if he didn't follow me out into the star-filled night, if he didn't watch me the way he did, touching his mouth with his fingertips.
But I didn't want him to stop. I was sorry for Starr, but not enough. I had the sin virus. I was the center of my own universe, it was the stars that were moving, rearranging themselves around me, and I liked the way he looked at me. Who had ever looked at me, who had ever noticed me? If this was evil, let God change my mind.
Dear Astrid,
Do not tell me how much you admire this man, how he cares for you! I don't know which is worse, your Jesus phase or the advent of a middle-aged suitor. You must find a boy your own age, someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered, someone whose fingers are a poem. Never lie down for the father. I forbid it, do you understand?
Mother.
You couldn't stop it, Mother. I didn't have to listen to you anymore.
IT WAS SPRING, painting the hillsides with orange drifts of California poppies, dotting the cracks in gas stations and parking lots with poppies and blue lupine and Indian paintbrush. Even in the burn zones, the passes were matted with yellow mustard as we jounced along in Ray's old pickup truck.
I told him I wanted to see the new development up in Lancaster, the custom cabinetry he 'd been working on. Maybe he could pick me up after school sometime. "You know how funny Starr's been," I said. Every day I came out of school hoping I would see his truck with the feathered roach clip hanging from the rearview mirror. Finally he had come.
The development itself was bare as a scar, with torn and dusty streets of big new houses. Some were already roofed and sided, others finished to the insulation, some skeletal and open to the sky. Ray led me through the house where he was working, clean, the exterior finished, smelling of raw sawdust. He showed me the solid maple cabinetry in the eat-in kitchen, the bay window, the built-in bookcases, the backyard gazebo. I felt the sun glinting off my hair, knew how my mother felt that day long ago at the Small World bookstore, when she had seen my father and stood in the window, beautiful in the light.
I let him show me around like a real estate agent — the living room's two-story picture window, the streamlined toilets in the two and a half baths, the turned banister, the carved newel post. "I lived in a house like this when I was married," he said, running his hand along the flank of the heavy banister, pushing against the solidity of the post. I tried to imagine Ray in a two-and-a-half-bath life, dinner on the table at six, the regular job, the wife, the kid. But I couldn't. Anyway, even when he was doing it, he was going to the Trop instead of coming home, falling in love with strippers.
I followed him upstairs, where he showed me the finish work, cedar-lined linen closets and window seats. In the master bedroom we could hear the hammering from the other houses and the sound of the bulldozer cutting a pad for a new one. Ray looked out the smudgy casement at the surrounding construction. I imagined what the room would look like once the people moved in. Lilac carpets and blue roses on the bedspread, white-and-gold double dresser, headboard. I liked it better the way it was, pink wood, the sweet raw smell. I watched the browns and greens of his Pendleton shirt, his hands spread on either side of the window frame, as he looked down into the unplanted yard. "What are you thinking?" I asked him.
"That they won't be happy," he said quietly.
"Who?"
"People who buy these houses. I'm building houses for people who won't be happy in them." His good face looked so sad.
I came closer to him. "Why can't they?"
He pressed his forehead to the window, so new there was still a sticker on it. "Because it's always wrong. They don't want to hurt anyone."
I could smell his sweat, sharp and strong, a man's smell, and it was hot in the room with the new windows, heady with the fragrance of raw wood. I put my hands around his waist, pressed my face into the scratchy wool between his shoulder blades, something I'd wanted to do since he held me that first Sunday when I'd ditched church and stayed behind in the trailer. I closed my eyes and breathed in his scent, dope and sweat and new wood. He didn't move, just gave a shuddering sigh.
"You're a kid," he said.
"I'm a fish swimming by, Ray," I whispered into his neck. "Catch me if you want me."
For a moment he stood still as a suspect, his hands open on the window frame. Then he caught my hands, turned them over and kissed the palms, pressed them to his face. And I was the one who was trembling, it was me and my marguerite.
He turned and held me. It was precisely how I had wanted to be held, all my life — by strong arms and a broad, wool-shirted chest smelling of tobacco and pot. I threw my head back and it was my first kiss, I opened my mouth for him to taste me, my lips, my tongue. I couldn't stop shaking unless he held me very tight.
He pushed me away then, gently. "Look, maybe we should go back. It isn't right."
I didn't care what was right anymore. I had a condom from Carolee's drawer in my pocket, and the man I'd always wanted for once in a place we could be alone.
I took off my plaid shirt, tossed it onto the floor. I took off my T-shirt. I took off my bra and let him see me, small and very pale, not Starr, but me, all I had. I untied my hiking boots, kicked them off. I unbuttoned my jeans and let them fall.
Ray looked sad right then, like someone was dying, his back pressed against the smudged window. "I never wanted this to happen," he said.
"You're a liar, Ray," I said.
Then he was kneeling in front of me, his arms around my hips, kissing my belly, my thighs, his hands on my bare bottom, fingers in the silky wetness between my legs, tasting me there. My smell on his mouth as I knelt down with him, ran my hands over his body, opened his clothes, felt for him, hard, larger than I'd thought it would be. And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.
8
ALL DAY AT SCHOOL, and in the Ray-less afternoons down the wash, or at dinner with Starr and the kids, or when we watched TV at night, Ray was my only thought, my singular obsession. How soft his skin was, softer than you'd think a man's skin could be, and the thickness of his arms, the sinews tracing along his forearms like tree roots, and the sad way he looked at me when my clothes were gone.
I sketched the way he looked nude, gazing out the window after we'd made love, or lying on the pile of carpet padding he'd dragged into the corner of the new bedroom. On our afternoons we'd lie on those pads, our legs entwined, smooth over hairy, his fingers lightly covering my breast and playing with my nipple, making it stand up like a pencil eraser. I hid the drawings in the box with my mother's journals, a place Starr would never think to look. I knew I should throw them out, but I couldn't bear to.
"Why are you with Starr?" I asked him one afternoon, tracing the white scar under his ribs where a Vietcong bullet had left its mark.
He ran his fingertips over my ribs so the goose bumps came up. "She's the only woman who ever let me just be myself," he said.
"I would," I said, doing the same on his balls with the back of my fingernails, making him jump. "Is she good in bed, is that it?"
"That's personal," he said. He covered my hand with his and held it to his groin. I felt him growing hard again. "I don't talk about one woman to another. That's plain bad manners."
He ran his finger between my legs, into the wet like silk, then put his finger in his mouth. I never imagined it would be like this, to be desired. Everything was possible. He pulled me on top of him and I rode him like a horse in the surf, my forehead against his chest, riding through a spray of sparks. If my mother were free, would this be one of her lovers, filling me up with his stars? And would my mother watch me the way Starr did, realizing I was no longer transparent as an encyclopedia overlay?
No. If she were free, I wouldn't be here. She would never have allowed me to have this. She kept everything good for herself.
"I love you, Ray," I said.
"Shhh," he said, holding my hips. His eyelids fluttered. "Don't say anything."
So I just rode, the ocean spray tingling all over me, the tide rising, filled with starfish and phosphorescence, into the dawn.
STARR'S EDGINESS spilled over, mostly at the kids. She was accusing her daughter of all the things she wanted to accuse me of. Carolee barely ever came home, she went dirt hiking with Derrick in the afternoon, the drone of the bikes like a nagging doubt. When I wasn't with Ray, I stayed at school or went to the library, or hunted frogs with the boys as the Big Tujunga's winter flow slowly dried up into rivulets and muddy pools. The frogs looked like the mud and you had to be very still to see them. Mostly I just sat on a rock in the sun and painted.
But one day I came home from the wash to find Starr curled up on the porch swing, her hair in hot rollers, wearing a blue blouse tied up tight under her breasts and tiny cutoffs that bunched up at her crotch. She was playing with the kittens the cat had had under the house that spring, fishing for them with ribbons Davey had tied to a stick. She was laughing and talking to them, it wasn't like her. She usually called them rats with fur.
"Well, the artiste. Come talk to me, missy, I'm so bored I'm talking to cats."
She never wanted to talk to me, and there was something about her mouth that seemed slower than the words she was saying. She gave me the stick and took a cigarette out of the Benson and Hedges pack. She stuck the wrong end in her mouth, and I watched to see if she would light it. She caught it just in time. "Don't know which end is up," she joked, and took a sip from her coffee cup. I dragged the ribbons along the carpet, luring a little gray-and-white furball out from beneath the swing. It hopped, pounced, ran off.
"So talk to me," she said, taking an exaggerated drag from her cigarette and blowing it out in a long stream. She bared her lovely throat as she arched back her neck, her head huge with hot curlers like a dandelion puff. "We used to talk all the time. Everybody's so darn busy, that's what's wrong with life. You seen Carolee?"
Up the road, we could both see the plumes of dust from the dirt bikes rising into the thin blue sky. I wanted to be dust, smoke, the wind, sun glimmering over the chaparral, anywhere but sitting here with the woman whose man I was stealing.