‘Really! Both of you?’
‘Me too! Yeah, yeah. A while ago. Well, earlier today, actually.’
‘To be honest, I liked it, but then I hated it.’
‘But yeah, me too. Nah, nah.’
‘No, not Billie. Not yet. Maybe never, to be honest. She doesn’t even drink, much.’
And though nothing they said was particularly funny, he laughed his old laugh. His old Ernie-laugh. Thank God for Ernie.
Then, while he was thinking of something else, he was delivered back to his old frame of mind. Whew! And yet, within seconds, he was remembering being stoned as a pleasurable experience. Scary, sure, but like a roller-coaster ride. Adrenalin washing the pettiness of daily life out of him, and now he felt like a new man. A different man, but with a connection to his youngest, truest self. The Jacko he’d thought he’d lost for ever. That cocky boy. He said to himself: parenthood and marriage clipped my wings, but I am back in the saddle now. (Automatically he noted his mixed metaphor, as if he was editing some manuscript. Some days, he couldn’t say or hear anything without mentally editing it. Every time someone said Have a nice day! he marked it with a red pen. Cliché. Unless it was meant ironically, of course.)
All evening, he took covert looks at Billie, while she was scolding the children, filling the dishwasher, picking her nose when she thought no one could see her. Later in bed, he told her to leave the light on, and she did, reluctantly. Asked her to take her pyjamas off slowly. And she did.
‘Wait, honey,’ she said. ‘Wait till I get a thing for you.’
But suddenly things had gone too far, and he thought: Oh well, what harm can one time without do? Also thought: when was the last time he’d felt like this? The last time she’d kissed him back like this? In fact, had they ever kissed like this before? The waterbed sloshed noisily for fifteen minutes.
Two months passed. Billie was on a grapefruit diet, but it was a disaster. She’d been eating nothing but grapefruit for almost seven weeks, and all she had was indigestion. In fact, she’d put on weight! Billie was thirty-eight and in search of her eighteen-inch waist. She blamed her children. Three delivered by caesarean, after stretching her poor belly skin to smithereens. The memory of Charlie flicked through her with its habitual jagged bite, then her thoughts moved on, she always made them move on. He was the flicker that shadowed her days. A silence that took up space, rising and then falling back again. She would wear that grey dress again. It cost a fortune, and she would not give it to the Goodwill. It hung at the front of her closet, a daily taunt. Wasn’t it pretty, with its fine embroidery on the yoke, and the three-quarter-length sleeves? The narrow grey belt? Sophisticated, that’s what it was. Something a valley girl would wear, it was not. Every time Billie thought of her childhood, she shuddered. Milly Mae Molinelli grew up in a hick town. Billie MacAlister, or Mrs Jack MacAlister as she preferred to be called, lived in her own house in Marin County, the wife of a very successful publishing executive. (So what if his business card called him editor; he was an executive, really. She told everyone so.) Her children – a girl and a boy, yes, how lucky! – attended a good school and played with the children of psychiatrists and doctors and lawyers. Mrs Jack MacAlister dressed with understated flair. She was classy. Very. She wore real Levis, not cheap imitation Levis. She bought expensive (on sale) dresses from I. Magnins, if proof was needed.
Every day, she sent her young husband off to work in his Brooks Brothers yellow or pink shirt. Well, Jack was not young, but to Billie he was still exactly the same boy with extraordinary cowlicks who’d walked into her office that day. In her mind, the fact she’d married him was entirely down to her determination, born that first day, to catch that cocky boy as he was walking away from her down Pine Street. Cupid with his arrow poised had Billie’s face and her steady aim. She’d arranged her own marriage. And if it wasn’t always perfect, well – c’est la vie! Also, que sera sera! It was perfectly normal to feel life was one step forward, two steps back. Or was it two steps forward, one step back? Some days felt like one step forward, six steps back.
Maybe she should quit the grapefruit diet, she was starting to feel sick. Car sick, all day. Or maybe she really was sick. A stomach bug. Or food poisoning. Then one day, a Monday, her shopping day, she vomited in the cold cereal aisle. It was that sudden – no warning, no time to get to the bathroom. Her children were disgusted. Billie was embarrassed, but also worried now. She made a doctor’s appointment.
‘How long have you been feeling nauseous?’
‘Oh, a few months.’ She wouldn’t tell him about the grapefruit diet. He’d scold her.
‘Could you be expecting?’
She looked at him blankly, waiting for him to finish his sentence. Expecting what? For it to rain at last? For her waist to return and the grey dress to fit?
Eating normally again was bliss. Now that she knew the reason, the sick feeling was ignorable. As soon as Jack got home, she’d tell him. Except that when he got home, he was in a lousy mood for some reason to do with his boss, and a writer whose name was misspelled on the book cover. So she decided to wait. Billie had more respect for her husband and his career than most people had for the president. Well, this president, anyway.
Besides, he’d said many times that two was the perfect number. (Charlie had been an accident too.) Their house only had three bedrooms. Their family was complete, and other challenges were occupying him now. While rehearsing how to tell him, she cooked his favourite dinner: meatloaf. She poured a lot of ketchup into the meat mixture, and used white bread crumbs, a few spoons of sugar and an egg. Squished it all between her fingers till it was gluey enough to form a loaf. Three strips of bacon over the top, for that salty crispy flavour. Ah! Nothing like meatloaf. They both liked it, though it was valley food, so a private liking. She’d tell him tonight. After dinner.
She glanced at him occasionally while she was peeling potatoes. He sat in the living room and frowned over a chequebook. Oh dear. Budget night again already. How could she have forgotten? She’d wait till tomorrow to tell him. Or the weekend. He was always more relaxed on the weekend. Maybe they’d have a dinner party, with some of Jack’s work friends. It was kind of cute the way he got out his brass water pipe when they had company. Everyone was wanting to try it these days. Their crowd had been invited to join the party after all. Personally, she didn’t care for marijuana. She had enough trouble holding her thoughts in a useful way as it was. And besides, smoking anything these days made her cough. At the same time, she was proud her husband smoked the occasional joint or pipe. They were a modern liberal family. She was still doing things her mother would not approve of.
‘Hooray!’ she said softly to herself, breaking up the syllables to make two words. Hoo. Ray.
Meanwhile, the kitchen radio played KFRC’s hit parade. The new hit by the Bee Gees, ‘To Love Somebody’. And while the meatloaf sizzled in the oven, Billie’s feet did a graceful little dance between the sink and the counters. She didn’t even notice – she was that anxious about her secret. Her breasts were hot and heavy already, but the rest of her, her feet and legs, her arms and hands, were blissfully unaware of the change, while she slow danced with herself.
She sang along.
There’s a light, a nanana of light, that shines on me. Nananananana. If I ain’t got you. If I ain’t got you. You don’t know what it’s like, you don’t know what it’s like, to love nanana, to love nanana. The way that I love you.
She didn’t know all the words; she never did and she didn’t care.
HOME ON THE ROAD
TWO YEARS EARLIER
April 10th, 1965,
Highway Five 8:42am
They were driving up the valley highway. Elisabeth and Sam were sitting in the back seat of the old green Hillman. Billie looked out the front window, but the low morning sun flickering dark-bright, dark-bright through the straight rows of olive trees hurt her eyes, so she turned to look out the side window. Concentrated on looking down each long row of trees. Focus, blur, focus again; a row a second. In and out. It was hard work but it kept her busy and it was not as confusing. She was very tired. Then her eye caught the first sign. It was a wooden placard of a fat Italian-looking woman, her black hair in a red spotted kerchief and a frying pan in her hand. And though she was nearly thirty-six, she still felt the old excitement. She forgot the rows of trees and sat forward to look for the next sign. Her mouth started to water in anticipation, and there it was – a thin wooden man in a blue striped apron, his hands on his hips and a string of sausages dangling around his neck. Yes. Then the sign with the single word. Bill. Then the sign saying and Kathy’s.
She turned around to see if the kids had noticed. For a millisecond, she saw Charlie between them, his chubby cheeks and his wild infant hair, then he was gone. Sam and Elisabeth’s eyes were not shut, but they looked asleep. Slack, pale. She couldn’t help but notice again how they’d lost their cuteness. In fact, at twelve and ten they were both, in different ways, quite funny looking. Sam was still very blond and Elisabeth’s dark hair was pretty, but they were both too skinny, too freckled and pale, with sticky out ears and gangly hands and large bony feet. She and Jack had discussed this and laughed. How could two beautiful people make such funny-looking kids? Maybe it would skip a generation. Maybe their granddaughters would have feminine feet and their grandsons not have sticky out ears. Meanwhile, even as it puzzled her, she felt an extra protectiveness towards Sam and Elisabeth. To begin life with such a disadvantage.
‘Anyone awake yet? No?’ shouted Jack. ‘Then we’ll forget Bill and Kathy’s and keep going.’
‘Stop the car! Pancakes!’ both the children cried, shedding years and yelling like six-year-olds.
On the horizon, across from twin silver silos and surrounded by flat fields, was the familiar building – log cabin style, with old covered-wagon wheels fencing in ice plants.
‘Nah, let’s go on to the Red Top. It’s only thirty miles.’
‘Daddy! Stop the car! Put on your blinker, put on your brakes!’
‘What? Did you hear something, honey?’ No slowing down.
‘Jack, cut it out. They’ll be hysterical. She’ll throw up.’
‘Mom’s right. I’m going to be sick, I’m going to vomit all over the seat, stop the car!’
‘You always go too far, Jack.’
He smiled as if this was a compliment. Sprinklers sprayed them lightly as they walked up the path to the restaurant, the kids running ahead. Bacon and coffee beckoned, but it was the pancakes they came for. Short stacks, tall stacks, five inches across, melting whipped butter and hot maple syrup. Sometimes the blueberry syrup. Every Easter and every Thanksgiving – the long drive up the valley to Billie’s mother in Redding. They always had early morning starts, and in the beginning Jack and Billie would carry the limp pretending-to-be-asleep bodies of their children out to the car and bundle them into the back seat. Pancakes at Bill and Kathy’s was part of the ritual.
