Joan Peeler frowned, pouring tea through a wicker strainer into a chipped cup. "Why don't the other girls complain?"
"They're afraid of a worse placement. She says if we complain she'll send us to Mac."
Joan put her strainer down. "If what you say is true and we can prove it, she can have her license revoked."
I imagined how it would really play. Joan started her investigation, got transferred to the San Gabriel Valley, and I lost my chance to have a young caseworker who still got excited about her clients. "That could take a long time. I need out now."
"But what about the other children? Don't you care what happens to them?" Joan Peeler's eyes were large and disappointed in me, ringed in dark liner outside the lids.
I thought of the other girls, quiet Micaela, Lina, little Kiki Torrez. They were as hungry as I was. And the girls who came after us, girls who right now didn't even know the word foster, what about them? I should want to close Amelia down. But it was hard for me to picture those girls. All I knew was, I was starving and I had to get myself out of there. I felt terrible that I would want to save myself and not them. It wasn't how I wanted to think of myself. But at bottom, I knew they'd do the same. No one was going to worry about me if they had a chance to get out. I'd feel the wind as they hit the door. "I've stopped having my period," I said. "I eat out of the trash. Don't ask me to wait." Reverend Thomas said that in hell, the sinners were indifferent to the suffering of others, it was part of damnation. I hadn't understood that until now.
She bought me another pastry, and I made a sketch of her on the back of one of her papers, drew her hair a little less stringy, overlooked the zit on her chin, spaced her gray eyes a bit better. I dated it and gave it to her. A year ago I would have felt a panic at being thought heartless. Now I just wanted to eat regularly.
JOAN PEELER said she had never come across a kid like me, she wanted to have me tested. I spent a couple of days filling out forms with a fat black pencil. Sheep is to horse as ostrich is to what. I'd been through this before, when we came back from Europe and they thought I was retarded. I wasn't tempted to draw pictures on the computer cards this time. Joan said the results were significant. I should be going to a special school, I should be challenged, I was beyond tenth grade, I should be in college already.
She started visiting me weekly, sometimes twice a week, taking me out for a good meal on the county. Fried chicken, pork chops. Half-pound hamburgers at restaurants where all the waiters were actors. They brought us extra onion rings and sides of cole slaw.
During these meals, Joan Peeler told me about herself. She was really a screenwriter, social work was just her day job. Screenwriter. I imagined my mother's sneer. Joan was writing a screenplay about her experiences as a caseworker for DCS. "You wouldn't believe the things I've seen. It's incredible." Her boyfriend, Marsh, was also a screenwriter; he worked for Kinko's Copies. They had a white dog named Casper. She wanted to win my trust so I would tell her things about my life to include in her screenplay. Research, she called it. She was hip, working for the county, she knew where it was at, I could tell her anything.
It was a game. She wanted me to strip myself bare, I lifted my long sleeve to the elbow, let her see a few of my dogbite scars. I hated her and needed her. Joan Peeler never ate a stick of margarine. She never begged for quarters in a liquor store parking lot to make a phone call. I felt like I was trading pieces of myself for hamburgers. Strips of my thigh to bait the hook. While we talked, I sketched naked Carnival dancers wearing elaborate masks.
16
JOAN PEELER found me a new placement. The girls pointedly ignored me as Joan helped me carry my stuff out to her red dented Karmann Ghia with bumper stickers that said, Love Your Mother, Move to the Light, Friends Don't Let Friends Vote Republican. Silvana sniffed that it was because I was white, I got special treatment. Maybe she was right. She probably was. It wasn't fair at all. It wasn't. But that March day, one of those perfect March days in L.A. when every photographer in town was out scrambling for shots of the city with a bluebird sky and white-capped mountains and hundred-mile views, I didn't care why. All I cared was that I was leaving.
There was snow on Baldy, and you could see every palm tree on Wilshire Boulevard five miles away. Joan Peeler played a Talking Heads tape for the drive.
"You'll like these people, Astrid," she said as we drove west on Melrose, past body shops and pupuserias. "Ron and Claire Richards. She's an actress and he does something with television.
"Do they have kids?" I asked. Hoping they didn't. No more babysitting, or 99-cent gifts when the two-year-old gets a ride-in Barbie car.
"No. In fact, they're looking to adopt."
That was a new one, something I never considered. Adoption. The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box. I didn't know what to think. We passed Paramount Studios, the big triple-arched gate, parking kiosk, people riding around on fat-tired bicycles. The longing in her eyes. "Next year, I'll be in there," Joan said. Sometimes I didn't know who was younger, her or me.
I handled the word adoption in my mind like it was radioactive, saw my mother's face, pulpy and blind in sunken-cheeked fury.
Joan drove through the strip of funky Melrose shops west of La Brea, with shops of used boots and toys for grown-ups, turned south onto a quiet side street, into an old neighborhood of stucco bungalows and full-growth sycamores with chalky white trunks and leaves like hands. We parked in front of one, and I followed Joan to the door. An enamel plaque under the doorbell read The Richards in script. Joan rang the doorbell.
The woman who answered the door reminded me of Audrey Hepburn. Dark hair, long neck, wide radiant smile, about thirty. Her cheeks were flushed as she waved us in. "I'm Claire. We've been waiting for you." She had an old-fashioned kind of voice, velvety, her words completely enunciated, ing instead of in', the t crisp, precise.
Joan carried my suitcase. I had my mother's books and Uncle Ray's box, my Olivia things in a bag.
"Here, let me help you," the woman said, taking the bag, setting it on the coffee table. "Put that down anywhere."
I put my things next to the table, looked around the low-ceilinged living room painted a pinkish white, its floor stripped to reddish pine planks. I liked it already. There was a painting over the fireplace, a jellyfish on a dark blue background, penetrated with fine bright lines. Art, something painted by hand. I couldn't believe it. Someone bought a piece of art. And a wall of books with worn spines, CDs, records, and tapes. The free-form couch along two walls looked comfortable, a blue, red, and purple woven design, reading lamp in the center. I was afraid to breathe. This couldn't be right, it couldn't be for me. She was going to change her mind.
"There are just a few things we need to go over," Joan said, sitting down on the couch, opening her briefcase. "Astrid, could you excuse us?"
"Make yourself at home," Claire Richards said to me, smiling, reaching out in a gesture of gift. "Please, look around."
She sat down with Joan, who opened my file, but she kept smiling at me, too much, like she was worried what I'd think of her and her home. I wished I could tell her she had nothing to worry about.
I went into the kitchen. It was small, tiled red and white, with a pearly-topped table and chrome chairs. A real Leave It to Beaver kitchen, decorated with a salt and pepper shaker collection. Betty Boops and porcelain cows and sets of cacti. It was a kitchen to drink cocoa in, to play checkers. I was afraid of how much I wanted this.
I walked out into the small backyard, bright with wide flowerbeds and pots on a wooden deck, a weeping Chinese elm. There was a flying goose windmill, and red poinsettia grew against the house's white wall in the sun. Kitsch, I heard my mother's voice in my ear. But it wasn't, it was charming. Claire Richards was charming, with her wide love-me smile. Her bedroom, which backed up to the deck through open French doors, was charming. The quilt on the low pine double bed, the armoire, the hope chest, and the rag rug.
As I moved back into the hall, I could see them, heads together over the coffee table, looking at my file. "She's had an incredibly hard time of it," Joan Peeler was telling my new foster mother. "She was shot at one foster home ..."
Claire Richards shook her head in disbelief, that anyone could be so awful as to shoot a child.
The bathroom would be my favorite room, I could tell that already. Tiled aqua and rose, the original twenties ceramic, a frosted glass enclosure on the tub, a swan swimming between cattails. There was something deeply familiar about the swan. Had we lived somewhere with swan-etched glass like this? Bottles and soaps and candles nestled on the bath tray that stretched between the two sides of the tub. I opened containers and smelled and rubbed things on my arms. Luckily the scars were fading, Claire Richards wouldn't have to see the glaring red weals, she seemed the sensitive type.
They were still discussing my case as I moved to the front bedroom. "She's very bright, as I've said, but she's missed a lot of school — all the moving, you understand —" "Maybe some tutoring," Claire Richards said. My room. Soft pine twin beds, in case of sleepovers. Thin, old-fashioned patchwork quilts, real handmade quilts edged in eyelet lace. Calico half curtains, more eyelet. Pine desk, bookcase. A Dürer etching of a rabbit in a neat pinewood frame. It looked scared, every hair plain. Waiting to see what would happen. I sat down on the bed. I couldn't picture myself filling this room, inhabiting it, imposing my personality here.
Joan and I said our tearful good-byes, complete with hugs. "Well," Claire Richards said brightly after the social worker had gone. I was sitting next to her on the free-form couch. She clutched her hands around her knees, smiled. "Here you are." Her teeth were the blue-white of skim milk, translucent. I wished I could put her at ease. Although it was her house, she was more nervous than I was. "Did you see your room? I left it plain so you could put your own things up. Make it yours."
I wanted to tell her I wasn't what she expected. I was different, she might not want me. "I like the Dürer."
She laughed, a short burst, clapped her hands together. "Oh, I think we 're going to get along fine. I'm only sorry Ron couldn't be here. My husband. He's in Nova Scotia shooting this week, he won't be back until next Wednesday. But what can you do. Would you like some tea? Or a Coke? I bought Coke, I didn't know what you'd drink. We also have juice, or I could make you a smoothie —"
"Tea is fine," I said.
I NEVER SPENT more time with anyone than I spent with Claire Richards the week that followed. I could tell she'd never been around kids. She took me with her to the dry cleaner's, the bank, like she was afraid to leave me alone for a moment, as if I were five and not fifteen.
For a week, we ate out of paper cartons and jars with foreign writing on the labels from the Chalet Gourmet. Soft runny wedges of cheese, crusty baguettes, wrinkly Greek olives. Dark red proscuitto and honeydew melon, rose-scented diamonds of baklava. She didn't eat much, but urged me to finish the roast beef, the grapefruit sweet as an orange. After three months with Cruella, I didn't need urging.
We sat over our living room picnics and I told her stories about my mother, about the homes, avoiding anything too ugly, too extreme. I knew how to do this. I told her about my mother, but only the good things. I wasn't a complainer, I wouldn't end up saying bad things about you, Claire Richards.
She showed me her photo albums and scrapbooks. I didn't recognize her in the pictures. She was very shy, I could hardly imagine her in front of an audience, but I saw from her albums that in character, she didn't even resemble her normal self. She sang, she danced, she wept on her knees with a veil over her head. She laughed in a low-cut blouse, a sword in her hand.
"That's Threepenny Opera," she said. "We did it at Yale."
She was Lady Macbeth, before that the daughter in 'Night, Mother. Catherine in Suddenly, Last Summer.
She didn't act much anymore. She slid her garnet heart pendant along its chain, tucked it under her ripe lower lip. "I get so tired of it. You spend hours getting ready, drag yourself to the call, where they look at you for two seconds and decide you're too ethnic. Too classic. Too something."
"Too ethnic?" Her wide pale forehead, her glossy hair.
"It means brunette." She smiled. One front tooth was crooked, it crossed just slightly over the other one. "Too small means breasts. Classic means old. It's not a very nice business, I'm afraid. I still go out, but it's an exercise in futility."
I wiped the last of the Boursin cheese out of the container with my finger. "Why do it then?"
"What, and give up show business?" She laughed so easily, when she was happy, but also when she was sad.
THE NEW Beverly Cinema was right around the corner from her house. They were playing King of Hearts and Children of Paradise, and we bought a giant popcorn and laughed and cried and laughed at each other crying. I used to go there all the time with my mother, but the movies were different. She didn't like weepy films. She liked to quote D. H. Lawrence: "Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got." Hers were grim European films — Antonioni, Bertolucci, Bergman — films where everybody died or wished they had. Claire's movies were lovely dreams. I wanted to crawl inside them, live in them, a pretty mad girl in a tutu. Gluttonous, we went back and saw them again the next night. My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.