Chapter 12
Marlo and I sat down together on a wooden bench that faced
Her hair was loose and she shook her head gently causing it to brush
against my cheek. She said, “I want to paint this. The clouds, the Kaiser building reflected in
the lake, the ducks flying overhead, the boathouse. Even the wind
... I want to capture it on canvas.”
“If at the moment of your death you had two choices, one, to live your
life over again an infinite number of times, exactly as you’ve lived it or,
two, to end it forever in nothingness, which would you choose? ”
She turned towards me. Her forehead
moved downward, gracefully, and her eyes acknowledged my tentative, encouraging
smile. Her tiny voice pronounced the
words slowly and distinctly, “I would
choose to live it over and over again.”
“Even the rape?”
“I don't want to talk about it.”
She had only told me that she had lost all power of resistance and, rather
enigmatically, that she had lost consciousness several times and was deeply
ashamed. I said, “You might get bored with me if you had to be
here with me by the lake, over and over, for all eternity.”
“When I’m with you, I’m never bored.”
She paused. “My mother is strong
and good at heart but she is boring. She
lives in a black and white world where everything has a definition and everything
has its place. She is afraid to let things
happen and she can’t let herself go.”
“You said you weren’t good in school.
Was it because of your mother?”
Her forehead darkened and she looked away.
“I don’t know.” Her thick blonde
hair fell across her face. A vigorous
movement of her head caused it to move back into place again. “She wouldn’t let me play a musical instrument.
She wouldn’t let me read the books I liked.
She’s French, and her parents were Communists.
She wanted me to read the books that her parents made her read when she
was a girl and they bored me. I love
poetry and painting and she thinks they are a waste of time.”
“I suppose she wants you to study something more practical like engineering.”
“Yes. She wanted me to become a lawyer for awhile,
but she gave up on that.”
I said, although I knew nothing about it,
“Law seems arbitrary and infinitely boring.”
“I love simple things. Things
that I can see and touch and smell and watch grow.
Maybe that’s why I liked watching you play baseball.” Her blue eyes widened.
“I was in heaven sitting there in the stands.
Until your knuckleball bounced off McClenden’s
head and the whole team came running.”
“I wish you could have seen the
“Teach me,” she said.
I drew my knees in towards my chest
and vaulted into the air, landing on my feet with a flourish.
“Teach me.”
I told her to take off her shoes and
socks.
She said, “It feels so good to go barefoot in the grass.”
She bounded away gracefully like a young gazelle, on the balls of her
feet, to a tree about twenty feet away. A
man in his thirties, walking by on the sidewalk, gave her an appreciative look.
“You move like a dancer!” She
bowed in the manner of a ballet dancer and then sprinted towards me. She came to a skidding halt in front of me,
out of breath.
“I was on the track team in junior high.
It was one of the things my mother let me do.”
“You have to follow my instructions exactly.”
Her eyes assented and she smiled up at me with abandon.
I said, “I’m going to test your
reflexes.” I crouched like a wrestler with my arms outstretched.
“Try to keep me from hitting you.”
A mirthful light came into her eyes.
I circled her and she put her arms up, moving her body with each movement
of my own. She watched my eyes and hands, intently. I lunged and withdrew and she fell off balance
and her arms dropped. As soon as she
regained her balance I threw a quick opened-handed jab at her cheek and her
hand rose reflexively and caught my wrist.
I said, “I thought so. You have
the reflexes of a sprinter.”
Still holding my wrist, she asked, “How
do you know?”
“I was a sprinter too. I know.”
She blinked.
I said, “When you knock something
off a table, your hand catches it before it hits the floor doesn’t it?”
“Sometimes.” She looked at the knuckles of my hand. “What happened to your hand?”
I was silent.
“They look horrible. Will you
be able to pitch?”
“Not for a couple of weeks.”
She looked away into some private place.
I said, “Are you ready?”
I guided her into a headstand and a pretty toe, with its polished toenail,
dangled in front of my mouth. “It’s beautiful,”
I said, took it into my mouth and bit it gently. Her high-pitched cry filled the air.
“I’m going to guide you down.” We
sank down together onto the grass.
We looked up to see two men standing motionless, watching us from the
sidewalk. One, a large Mexican, began
clapping in applause. His black eyes
danced and his white teeth shone from the middle of an unruly, black beard.
A tall, skinny man with stringy, red hair, stood next to him and a grin
spread across his milk-white face. He stared fixedly at Marlo
and his tongue lolled in his mouth. The
Mexican gave a last assessing leer and they walked on.
We lay back in the grass and watched them move away. She said, “I’m
glad you’re here.”
“I guess they appreciate talent. Did you ever think of running away and
joining the circus?”
The neon sign of the Grand Lake Theater
exploded over her head like a multi-colored meteorite. It rose and fell over the soft, white lines
of the Greek colonnade at the end of the lake. The muscles of my mouth twitched
into a smile and I wondered why they turned on during the day sometimes. I imagined that some hapless employee forgot
to turn it off the night before. Gently,
she pulled my face to hers. I closed
my eyes and she kissed my lips. When I opened my eyes, I looked up to see a
man of about fifty, a few feet from us, looking down at us and stroking his
gray goatee. He became self-conscious
and walked on.
I said, “You seem to attract a
lot of attention.”
She kissed my cheek and said, “Don’t talk.”
I nuzzled the back of her ear and sank into the softness of her neck,
kissing the pulsing jugular vein that was visible under her skin.
She kissed my lips again and we rolled on the grass. I stroked her forehead with the flat of my hand
and explored the line of her ear and neck with my fingers.
She said, “I love you.”
I stared into her face for a few seconds.
“I love you too.”
The expression on her faced transformed itself into a comely mixture
of seriousness and rapture. We lay back
on the grass and watched the clouds moving overhead.
After a very long silence, I asked, “Were
you a virgin?”
“Yes.”
We sat up and I picked a handful of grass.
I wove the longest strands into a ring, the way my grandfather had taught
me. She watched curiously, as I looped
and twisted the blades of grass together. I took her left hand, spread the fingers apart
carefully and placed the loop on her ring finger. I said, “I know a spot where we can be alone.” She looked down at the ring and her eyes smiled.
I found the little turnout on
She said, with laughing eyes, “Let’s
go for a walk.”
I grabbed the Navaho blanket from the back seat and we ambled along the
dry, narrow trail surrounded by the lushness of the
I asked, “Do you believe in God?”
She didn’t answer right away and in the silence, I thought of the Indians
who had walked over the hills just a few generations before, as they had for
thousands of years. I had hiked the trails
of
She said, “No.”
The trail came to a bend and the forest broke into a spectacular view
of a meadow surrounded by giant redwoods and pines.
The bright green grass was sprinkled with an orange carpet of
She added. “My mother’s an atheist. It’s because she’s French.”
“Because she’s French?”
“About half of all French people are atheists.
She says its because of the French Revolution.”
“I didn’t hear a French accent.”
“She was born in
“Oh.” I pointed to a large oak tree in the center
of the meadow. “Let’s go down there and
spread the blanket near that tree.”
We ran and slid down a steep trail that led to the meadow and I spread
out the Navaho blanket under the tree.
I said, “A loaf of bread, a bottle
of wine and thou...”
She said, “I wonder why Navaho
blankets have swastikas on them.”
“It proves they were an advanced culture.”
Her smooth forehead wrinkled.
“I’m not a Nazi! It’s an interesting
geometrical design. If you cut a square into the two pieces that form a swastika,
the same two pieces can also be fitted together so that they form a cross.
That’s why they called the Swastika a twisted cross. It takes a sophisticated
knowledge of geometry to discover things like that.”
“I’ve never had a talent for mathematics.”
“I like it that you said it that way.
Most people just say mathematics is stupid or boring. They never admit they don’t have talent. In anything.”
She looked perplexed.
I said, “Tell me about your mother. She’s French and she’s an atheist. What else.”
“In the summer of 1939, when my mother was 13, her parents went to
“Were her parents Communists?”
“Yes.” She drew a breath and her blue eyes widened.
“I’ve never been inside a church in my life.”
A crow cawed from the top of a tall sugar pine.
“And that’s why your mother is a Communist.”
“She’s not a Communist anymore. She
hated Stalin. All I heard when I was
a little kid was that the Russians and Chinese destroyed Communism.” She sighed and I could see that she wanted to
change the subject.
“What happened to your mother’s parents?”
“They were captured by the Nazis and ended up in a concentration camp
in
“And you said she won’t talk about your father?”
“That’s right.”
I took her hand. We were lost
for a moment in the sounds and smells and colors of the meadow. Bees and butterflies floated and zigzagged around
our heads, among the bright orange
She said, “My mother was taken
in by a religious organization, in
“Your father and mother got divorced?”
“Yes.”
“What was your father like?”
“I don’t know much about him. All I
know is that he was religious when he was young and he lied to my mother so
she would marry him. He said he didn’t
believe in God anymore but a few months after they got married he became a preacher.”
She smiled, sadly. “We have a lot of pictures of him. He was very handsome. He was blond.” She smiled.
“He looked a little like you, actually.”
I didn’t feel handsome but I smiled.
I said, “Tell me about yourself.”
We were stretched out on the blanket and had snuggled into each other’s
arms and her head rested on my shoulder.
“There isn’t much to tell. I live
with my mother, in an apartment over a flower shop.
When I was a kid, during the summers and holidays, I worked there, selling
flowers. It seemed like heaven.
And I matured late. Physically, I mean. I was a flat-chested,
scruffy little kid until I was sixteen. The
boys didn’t notice me but I was always in love with one of them and I dreamed
about them in the flower shop. And, when
I wasn’t tending flowers, I drew horses, which I love. But I’ve never ridden a horse.” She looked into my eyes and a quick smile flickered
across her face and then she was serious again. “In one summer, I became a woman. It was the summer I turned 16. My mother still doesn’t believe it. She thinks I don’t remember correctly but it’s
true. I grew from a flat-chested, skinny girl into ... myself.... In one summer.”
She looked at me and her blue eyes were wide and serious again. “I’ll bet you had a lot of girlfriends in high
school. I’ll bet the cheerleader was
in love with you.”
I laughed. “Well first of all,
she’s Jewish. It’s true that we were
in love but my mother…” I waved my hand.
“Having a mother like Rhonda Bradford must have been difficult.”
“That’s an understatement. For
her, the only thing worse than marrying a Jew is being an atheist. I still have to lie to her about that.”
“What could she have done if you married…”
“Jane. Well. For
one thing, she wore black around the house and refused to talk to me for months.
She pretended that I died. Jane
finally broke up with me and I didn’t blame her.”
“Were you studying mathematics then?”
“Yes. My grandfather had just died and I was still
pretending to myself that he wasn’t dead, that he was away on a business trip.
I lost myself in mathematics for weeks at a time.”
“Did it take a long time to get over her?”
“It’s ironic isn’t it? Her parents
were killed in a Nazi concentration camp too. In
She said, “You’ve had a hard life.”
“It’s been a great life in a lot of ways.”
“I love you enough to let you go.”
“To let me go?”
“I just need a few months.”
“Have you ever had a boyfriend?”
She was silent.
I said, “You’re very beautiful.”
“I run from men. I don’t know
why.”
“Boys weren’t interested in you at all and then suddenly they were too
interested. So you started running.”
“That’s when Anne became my friend. We
hung out together and she and her brothers sort of protected me.”
“I’ll bet they both had a crush on you.”
“They were very well behaved. And
my mother was always home after school. She
worked in a French restaurant at night, and the family that owned the flower
shop kind of helped raise me when I was a kid, when she had to work. Mr. and Mrs. Gewirtz
are very strict. They’re kind of like
grandparents to me.”
“I thought your mother worked at Mel’s?”
“Just for the last few months. She
got into an argument with her boss at the Rouge et le Noir.
He’s married and he has been making passes at her for a long time. She finally put her foot down and he fired her.
She’s looking for another restaurant but she says he’s trying to blackball
her. And she’s 39 and it's harder for older people
to find jobs. It might take awhile.”
The crow made a long screeching noise.
She looked up. “He sounds resigned.”
He made the noise again and I answered him, imitating an angry crow.
“What did you say to him?”
“I asked him if he believes in God.”
“What did he say?”
“He hasn’t answered yet, sweetness.”
Another screech echoed in the meadow.
She asked, “Well?”
“He said, Yes and No.”
“I wonder if he’s ever been in a church.”
“Do you want me to ask him?”
“He’d probably just laugh.”
I lay back onto the grass and picked a California poppy. “These flowers used to be my favorites when
I was a kid. I loved them.”
“What are your favorites now?”
“I can’t decide anymore. I love
them all.”
She said, “It’s funny. I feel the same way. I love them all. If I single one out, if seems like I’m betraying
the other flowers.”
“Tell me some more about yourself. Tell
me what happened when you turned sixteen ...
When you ... filled out.”
“It’s a long story.”
“Tell me a little bit.”
“Well, for starters, the whole football team was after me and I was terrified.” She paused.
Her little voice whispered, “But
in secret, I wanted them.” She was silent.
“I was terrified but...” Her eyes got wide and her mouth moved soundlessly.
“You’re very brave.”
“I’m not brave.” Her eyes flared with anger.
“I’m sorry.”
“I fantasize about it sometimes.” She began to
cry.
I put my arm around her shoulder.
A tear rolled down her cheek and dropped onto her shirt.
I kissed the wet trail on her cheek.
She said, “It was about that time
that I met Anne.”
“When?”
“When I filled out. When I was
16.” Her eyes were bright and guileless and her
cheeks were ruddy from the late afternoon ocean breeze that came through the
trees. “If it hadn’t been for Anne I
never would have discovered my talent as an artist. And her two brothers protected me. I can’t betray Anne.”
I was puzzled because she knew that Anne and I had broken up.
We made love again, on the Navaho blanket under the oak tree. I fell asleep afterwards and I dreamed that
I was having a philosophical talk with the crow.
He was on the verge of revealing the secret of the universe when Marlo awakened me.
“Brad. Wake up.”
“What?”
“Your face.”
“What’s wrong with my face?”
“I’ve got my period!”
She stood up and raised her hands to the sky.
“I’m so happy.” The crow leaped
from the darkness of the pine tree and for a moment his wings were frozen against
the late afternoon sky. He swooped down
and made an awful screech and then rose majestically like a philosopher, I thought,
and disappeared over the tip of the largest redwood tree.