I cast and reeled, my back warm in the sun, stared into my shadow in the water where it formed a dark window in the reflections. I could see down to the bottom with the stones and the fishes, the shapes moving toward the fly.
Suddenly the reel sang and the line zipped out. I panicked. "I got one!" I screamed up to Ron. "What do I do?"
"Let him go, until he stops running," Ron yelled downriver to me.
The reel still turned, but finally slowed. "Now bring him back to you."
I reeled, feeling the weight of the fish, he was stronger than I thought, or the drag of the current on him. I dug my heels in and pulled, watched the long flexible rod bend in a whip curve. Then the line went slack. "He's gone!"
"Reel!" Ron yelled as he came wading downriver, carefully, step by step. He had the net out. "He's coming back this way."
I reeled like mad and sure enough, the line turned, he was swimming back upriver. I held my breath, I could not have anticipated my excitement at lowering my line into a river and having a living fish take the fly. Having something alive where I'd come in empty-handed.
"Play him out," Ron said.
I let the line spool away. The fish ran upstream. I shrieked with laughter as I stumbled into a hole and my waders filled with icy water. Ron pulled me up, steadied me. "You want me to land it for you? " Already reaching for my pole.
"No," I said, jerking it from him. It was my fish. Nobody was going to take this fish away from me. I felt as if I'd caught it on my own flesh, line from my clothes. I needed this fish.
Claire came to watch. She sat on the bank and drew her knees up to her chin. "Be careful," she said.
The fish made three more passes before Ron thought it was tired enough to bring in. "Reel him in now, reel him in."
My arm ached from the reeling, but my heart leapt as he broke from the water, gleaming liquid silver, two feet long. He was still thrashing wildly.
"Hold on to him, don't lose him now," Ron said, coming for the fish with his net.
I wouldn't lose this fish if it dragged me all the way to Coos Bay. Enough had slipped through my hands already.
Ron netted him and together we walked to the bank. Ron scrambled up the side, holding the giant thrashing fish in the net.
"It's so alive," Claire said. "Throw it back, Astrid."
"Are you kidding? Her first fish? Bop him," he said, handing me a hammer. "On the head."
The fish flopped on the grass, trying to jump back into the water.
"Quick, or we'll lose him."
"Astrid, don't." Claire looked at me with her tenderest wild-flower expression.
I took the hammer and whacked the fish in the head. Claire turned away. I knew what she was thinking, that I was siding with Ron, with the world and its harshness. But I wanted that fish. I took out the hook and held it up, and Ron took a picture of me like that. Claire wouldn't talk to me for the rest of the afternoon, but I felt like a real kid, and I didn't want to feel guilty about it.
I HATED THAT we had to go back to L.A. Now Claire had to share Ron with phone calls and faxes and too many people. Our house was full of projects and options, scripts in turnaround, industry rumors, notes in Variety. Ron's friends didn't know how to talk to me. The women ignored me and the men were too interested, they stood too close, they leaned in doorways and told me I was beautiful, was I thinking of acting?
I stayed close to Claire, but it made me nervous to watch her wait on these people, these indifferent strangers, chilling their white wine, making pesto, taking another trip to Chalet Gourmet. Ron said not to bother, they could order pizza, bring in El Polio Loco, but Claire said she could never serve guests out of cardboard containers. She didn't get it. They didn't see themselves as her guests. To them she was just a wife, an out-of-work actress, a drudge. There were so many pretty women that summer, in sundresses and bikini tops, sarongs, I knew she was trying to figure out which one was Ron's Circe.
Finally, she went on Prozac, but it gave her too much energy. She couldn't sit down, and she started to drink to even out the effects. Ron didn't like it because she said things that she thought were funny but nobody else laughed. She was like a woman in a film that was badly dubbed, either too fast or too slow. She bungled the punch lines.
IN SEPTEMBER, in wind and ashes, I started the twelfth grade at Fairfax, and Ron went back to work. Now Claire couldn't find enough to do in the husbandless house. She scrubbed floors, cleaned windows, rearranged the furniture. One day she gave all her clothes away to Goodwill. Without sedatives, she was up all night, filing magazine clippings, dusting books. She had headaches, and believed someone was listening in on the phone.
She swore she could hear the click before she hung up. She made me listen.
"Do you hear it?" she asked, her dark eyes glittering.
"Maybe," I said, not wanting her to be all alone in her night. "I can't really tell."
IN OCTOBER the heat gave way to the blue afternoon haze of true autumn, hand-shaped leaves of the sycamores showed orange against the dusty white trunks, and a red-gold blush lay on the hills. One day I came home from school and found Claire staring at herself in her round vanity mirror in her room, her silver brush forgotten in her hand. "My face is uneven, have you noticed? My nose is off-center." She turned her head to the side, examined the profile, puffed out her cheeks and pushed her imagined off-center nose to the right, mashed the tip down. "I hate pointed noses. Your mother has Garbo's nose, did you ever notice that? If I had mine done, I'd want one like that."
She wasn't talking about noses. Claire was just tired of seeing her own face in the mirror, it was a code of her failings. There was something missing, but it wasn't what she thought. She fretted that her hairline was receding, that she was going to end up looking like Edgar Allan Poe. Her fearful gaze magnified the incomplete tops of her ears, shrank her small lips.
"Small teeth mean bad luck," she said, showing them to me in the mirror. "Short life." Her teeth were barley beads, pearllike and gleaming. But her eyes had grown increasingly deep. I could hardly see the lids anymore, and her sharp bones once again made bridges in her face, a Rodin sculptured bronze head, merciless in its paring down.
As we got into December, Claire cheered up. She loved the holidays. She was reading magazines with pictures of Christmas in England, in Paris, in Taos, New Mexico. She wanted to do everything. "Let's have a perfect Christmas," she said.
We wired a wreath in eucalyptus and pomegranates we dipped into melted wax. She bought boxes of Christmas cards, soft handmade paper with lace and golden stars. Swan Lake played on the classical station. We sewed garlands of tiny chili peppers, stuck cloves into tangerines, tied them with velvet the color of brandy. She bought me a red velvet dress with a white lace collar and cuffs at Jessica McClintock in Beverly Hills. Perfect, she said.
It scared me when she said perfect. Perfect was always too much to ask.
RON CAME HOME until after New Year's. She waited for him, so we could all buy the tree together, like a real family. In the car, she described just what she wanted. Symmetrical, soft-needled, six feet at least. The tree man tried to help but gave up after pulling out and untwining dozens of trees.
"I don't get any of this," Ron said, watching Claire's desperate search. "Jesus grew up in Bethlehem. High desert. We should be buying an olive, a date palm. A frigging Jerusalem artichoke."
I walked along the side with the spray-painted trees, some in white like a starched chemical snowfall, others painted gold, pink, red, even black. The black tree, about three feet high, looked like it had been burnt. I wondered who would want a black tree, but I knew someone would. There was no limit to the ways in which people could be strange. Someone would buy it as a joke, a belated Halloween, to decorate with plastic skulls and tiny guillotines. Or it would become someone's Yuletide political statement. Or someone would take it just for the pleasure of making their kids cry.
The smell of the trees was like Oregon. If only we could be back there right now, a soft rain falling, in the cabin, the wood-stove. I joined Claire, where she was agonizing over a tree that was almost right, except for a bit of a gap in the branches on one side. She pointed it out with anxious hands. I assured her she could keep it to the wall, nobody would ever notice it.
"That's not the point," she said. "If something is wrong, you can't just turn it to the wall."
I knew what she meant, but convinced her to take it anyway.
At home, Claire instructed Ron in the hanging of lights. Originally she wanted candles, but Ron drew the line there. We wound strings of chilies and popcorn round and around, while Ron watched a big soccer game on TV. Mexico playing Argentina. He wouldn't turn it off so Claire could have Christmas carols. A mans world. He could barely pull himself away long enough to put the gold angel on top.
Claire turned out the room lights and we sat and watched the tree in the dark, while Mexico overran South America.
THE MORNING of Christmas Eve, Ron got a call about a vision of the Virgin Mary seen in Bayou St. Louis. He had to go film it. They had a big fight and Claire locked herself in their room. In the kitchen, I was polishing the silver, a job I'd learned to do very well. We were going to have dinner with crystal and linens. I had my new Christmas dress from Jessica McClintock. Claire had already stuffed the goose, and picked up a real English trifle from Chalet Gourmet. We had tickets for the midnight Messiah at the Hollywood Bowl.
We didn't go. I ate ham sandwiches and watched It's a Wonderful Life. Claire came out and threw the goose in the trash. She poured herself small glasses of sherry, one after the other, and watched TV with me, crying on and off in the plaid bathrobe Ron had given her as an early Christmas present. I had a glass or two of the sweet liquor to keep her company, it was no worse than cough syrup. She finally took a couple of sleeping pills and passed out on the couch. She snored like a mower in high grass.
She slept through most of Christmas morning, then woke with a terrible headache at noon. We didn't talk about Ron, but she wouldn't touch the presents he left for her. I got a real fisherman sweater, a new set of acrylic paints, a big book of Japanese woodcuts, and silk pajamas like something Myrna Loy would wear in a Thin Man movie.
My present was small compared with the ones Ron bought her. "Here, open something."
"I don't want anything," she said from under her washcloth soaked in vinegar.
"I made it for you."