Byrd Page 12

  William lives in a house on a hill on a cut-through street where drivers often speed. He has made a sign for his front yard, a black sandwich board painted with big yellow letters, and set it perpendicular to the street so that it can be seen from both directions. One side says, THIS IS A NEIGHBORHOOD WITH CHILDREN. The other says, SLOW THE FUCK DOWN.

  William is an open book, not afraid for people to know him. He throws big parties even though his house is gutted and full of lumber for the walls and cabinets he is going to build. On the Saturday before Easter, he has an egg-decorating party for all his artist friends. He rents folding tables and chairs. He orders dyes from a Ukrainian shop in New York. On the morning of the party he buys eggs, organic white ones that haven’t been scrubbed. He spreads newspapers and sets out votive candles and tins of beeswax and tiny tools with special names, and his artist friends come and sit around the tables and make egg art. They’ve all done this before: they know how to draw fine lines with wax, they know to use the pale dyes before the dark. They carry their finished eggs to the kitchen and blow them out in a big metal bowl in the sink. Raw-egg smell fills the house and makes Addie nauseous. This is her first time at the party, her first time decorating eggs that aren’t hard-boiled, and she does things backwards, blows out her egg first so that it can’t be dipped in dye, but she doesn’t want to waste the perfect eggshell so she glues cotton to it and makes a face and legs out of clay and calls it a sheep. It’s primitive, something a child might make. But William tells her he loves it, the wistful little face. He holds it up for his friends.

  “I drank too much,” Addie says on Easter Sunday. She is helping William put the egg things away. “My hands won’t stop shaking. I can’t remember a thing I said to your friends last night, but I remember talking. I talk too much. My father always called me a bigmouth.”

  “Did you know,” William says, “the mouth on the Statue of Liberty is three feet wide?”

  To cure her hangover he takes her out for hot fudge sundaes. It’s a sunny day and the patio at Goodberry’s is crowded with slouchy, flirty teenagers, parents with strollers, children pitching pennies in the fountain. Car radios blare from the parking lot.

  Everyone loves ice cream, especially Addie. William is unnerved by how fast her sundae disappears.

  Addie has a scar across her lower abdomen in the shape of a smile. She won’t let anyone see it. When she and William have sex, she turns off the lights.

  One night, in the dark, under the covers, he runs his finger across it. He is gentle and doesn’t ask any questions. Addie doesn’t offer any answers.

  Sometimes Addie wonders who will die first, she or William. She imagines the two of them old, their faces wrinkled, their eyes sunken but alert, stealing worried glances at each other, waiting.

  William is not afraid of dying. He is afraid of being left. Three women have left him so far: his mother, who died when he was thirteen; a woman he lived with, who said he needed her too much; and another woman he lived with, who said he was too self-sufficient and didn’t need her enough.

  Addie is afraid of her secret. Not that she gave up her child, which William would forgive, but that she didn’t tell Roland. Who would stay with someone like that?

  A woman comes in the store with a grocery bag full of Joni Mitchell CDs. The woman is middle-aged, wearing a dowdy sweater, but there is something young and dimly hopeful in her face, some girlish devotion. Addie pictures her as a teenager, lying across her bed, listening to music on Saturday nights when other girls were out on dates, playing her favorite songs again and again, memorizing the lyrics. Collecting every Joni Mitchell album. Eventually replacing the albums with CDs. Buying every new release, though she liked the music less and less, believing that sooner or later she’d be rewarded, sooner or later there would be another Blue, another Court and Spark, another Hissing of Summer Lawns or Hejira. Now, finally, after so many years, she’s come to understand: there will be no going back, for her or for Joni. You’d think this would make her even more grateful for Joni’s old music, but no, just the opposite. Now she can’t listen to Joni at all without feeling betrayed.

  Addie sees this a lot in the store: devoted readers turning on their favorite writers when the writers run out of things to say or interesting ways to say them.

  The woman sets her bag on the counter and in a high, round voice that sounds a little Canadian, a little like Joni, asks Peale what he will give her for “the complete discography.”

  “We don’t buy music,” he says.

  The woman has the grace of someone used to disappointment. “Thanks anyway,” she says, and carries her bag out of the store as hopefully as she entered. The front door ca-chinks behind her. Addie watches her down the sidewalk, her slow, careful stride, the way she cradles her bag in both arms.

  That night with William, Addie puts on Blue and they listen to Joni sing about all the people she ever lost or hurt. Joni’s voice is young and pure and sad. She is famous for her sadness.

  Before she got famous, everyone now knows, Joni had a baby daughter and gave her up. Recently the daughter found Joni. Their reunion was in the news. Almost every news story mentioned the “clues” Joni had left for the daughter in her music, though really there was just the one song, “Little Green”—never one of Addie’s favorites—and a couple of lines in another. It didn’t matter anyway, because the daughter grew up never hearing any of Joni’s music except for the duet she did with Seal.

  Addie has seen pictures of the daughter. She is beautiful, with long blond hair and high cheekbones. She is even more beautiful than Joni. When she and Joni were first reunited, she was gracious. She told reporters she was proud of her mother for making something of her life. Then Joni left her again to go on tour, and the daughter fell apart. She fought with Joni. Their fights were in the news. Addie tried to imagine them: the daughter saying to Joni, Tell me again why you gave me up. Joni saying, I had a gift. I had a responsibility to my gift. And besides, why would you want to be raised by someone who wasn’t cut out to be a mother?

  “What?” William says. He is holding Addie’s feet in his lap, moving them to the music.

  “Nothing.”

  I’m not like Joni, she thinks. I didn’t trade my child for a music career. I gave him up for nothing.

  Sometimes she and William hold hands, which makes Addie feel very young or very old instead of middle-aged. The best place for holding hands is the movie theater, where it’s dark and intimate and you can sit for a long time.

  They are regulars at the Rialto. They go see whatever is playing there. The current movie is Sliding Doors, with Gwyneth Paltrow. This is Addie’s favorite kind of movie, a what-if, where the main character gets a chance to see how her life might have turned out if fate hadn’t stepped in, if she hadn’t missed her train, hit her head, dropped her earring. If she’d chosen someone else. If she’d wanted a family.

  Reno

  Nevada is hot, brown, and poisonous, full of rattlesnakes, black widows, scorpions, casinos, whorehouses, nuclear dumps. Water is scarce. People eat their meals off buffets, get brain cancer, have run-ins with aliens, gamble themselves bankrupt. Nevada is the suicide capital of the country. Every summer, at a festival in the desert north of Reno, a big wooden effigy is set on fire and everybody chants Burn the man. The cities sound like slot machines. Nobody sleeps.

  Frank Zappa once said, “You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say.”

  But for Elle, Nevada is home. And home, or the memory of home, still has a kind of magic. As a young child, she lived with her parents in Reno, in a bungalow with a view of the Truckee River. Every morning her mother would open the curtains and the sun would flash on the river and the ground would come alive with robins and quail. Evenings, if her father got home from work in time, he would take her to Virginia Street to watch the arch light up.

  In 1972, when she was not yet twelve years old, her parents were killed in a car crash. It happened on a Saturday in
spring. Her parents were on their way home from Pyramid Lake, where they’d been fishing since dawn. They were driving the new Ford Pinto, shiny and brown as a bean. Elle wasn’t with them; she had slept over with her cousins, who lived in a brick house with shag carpet and a console color TV. It was lunchtime. Elle and her cousins were spread out on the living room floor eating pizza and watching Soul Train when, twenty-five miles north of town, the Pinto swerved off the highway. Elle’s father overcorrected, the car flipped, and the gas tank exploded. There were no other cars around, no witnesses, no evidence except tire marks and smoldering remains. The trooper who came to notify the family—a short man with a thick, embarrassed neck—couldn’t say absolutely that Elle’s parents had been killed on impact, but thought it likely, based on his experience. He didn’t know what caused the Pinto to swerve. Elle imagined a gust of wind, or an animal darting in front of the car, a rabbit or dog or coyote. Or maybe it was the shadow of a bird flying over. In the desert, shadows can play tricks.

  Elle’s aunt and uncle, who had two sons and a daughter of their own, took her in, and Elle shared a room with her girl cousin. She never stopped missing her parents or feeling the awful mix of guilt and relief that she hadn’t gone with them. But her aunt and uncle were determined to make her happy, or less unhappy. They took her places, bought her things: clothes, makeup, records, posters for her wall. Her cousins treated her like a sister.

  In spite of everyone’s kindness, or maybe because of it, Elle left Reno as soon as she was old enough to claim her small inheritance. She moved to L.A.—for good, she thought—telling her aunt and uncle she wanted to be in a place with an ocean. In fact what she wanted was a place where people wouldn’t feel the need to be kind.

  Nineteen years later, she’s back, sharing her old room with Dusty until her aunt can redecorate the boys’ room. Everything is the same as before: twin beds, chenille spreads, flowery wallpaper. “Gus roo,” Dusty calls it. Girls’ room.

  Elle’s uncle gets her a job as a cocktail waitress in a casino on Virginia Street. She is thirty-seven, old for cocktailing, and jobs aren’t as plentiful since the Indian casinos began cutting into Reno’s business, but Elle’s uncle has connections.

  “See?” Elle says to Dusty. “Our luck is changing.”

  She works the graveyard shift. Her aunt drives Dusty to and from school every day and takes care of him afternoons while Elle sleeps. Dusty goes to public school where he meets with a speech therapist but is otherwise in a regular class since he can read and write as well as anybody in second grade—better, in fact, because of his speech problem. When he writes, people understand him. He carries a memo pad in his pocket at all times.

  Every evening at six, Elle gets out of bed and cooks supper—pancakes or eggs if she’s in a breakfast mood, otherwise macaroni and cheese, Boca burgers, tofu dogs. She’s making vegetarians of them all. Her aunt and uncle like their steaks and chops, but they are gracious and accept Elle’s cooking as her contribution to the household.

  Most nights after supper, Roland calls from California. He talks to Dusty first, then to Elle. “What’s in Reno that isn’t here?” he asks her. “What do you want?”

  “I want to be somebody,” she says, quietly, so no one in the house can hear her.

  “You are,” he says.

  “Somebody important,” she says.

  “You are,” he says. “You’re my wife.”

  “More important than that.”

  “You’re the mother of my son.”

  “More important than that.”

  In the casino where she works there’s no night or day, only flashing lights and gaudy chandeliers and mirrored ceilings and patterned carpets that reek of cigarette smoke and fried food. Elle wears a strapless uniform and black stockings and serves drinks to people in vacation clothes. The losers are sad, but the winners are worse: men with chips piled in front of them, loud men with gold chains and ruddy faces, their eyes narrow and black as seeds. She bends over when she serves them and they give her big tips.

  When her shift is over she puts on sunglasses and walks outside. The morning light is painful. The younger waitresses like to put off daylight for another hour or two by going to the casino across the street. It’s their way of being friendly without having to get to know each other.

  One morning they invite Elle to go with them. They don’t know her. They don’t know she’s just left her husband. They don’t even know she has a husband, or a son.

  “Okay,” she says, trying not to sound excited.

  She hasn’t gambled since she was a child learning poker from her uncle. He taught her Texas Hold ’Em, Omaha Hi-Lo, Four-and-Four, Lamebrains, Criss-Cross, Night Baseball, and Follow the Queen—Elle’s favorite, a seven-card stud game in which the card that follows a turned-up queen is wild, and whenever another queen is turned up, the wild card changes. Elle and her uncle and cousins would sit around the kitchen table wearing visored caps, eating sliced bologna on saltines with mustard. Her uncle had names for the cards: Fever, Sexy, Savannah, Eddie, Arnold, Typewriter, Jake, Pretty Lady, Cowboy. He was not a sentimental teacher; he never purposely let anyone win, and Elle rarely did. Even playing penny-ante she sometimes lost all her allowance money. “I told you not to bluff,” her uncle would say. “In a low-stakes game it doesn’t pay to bluff because you can’t force anybody out. In a wild card game, don’t bet without a wild card.”

  The casino across the street is bigger than the one where she works, with more machines and more tables. She’s intimidated by table poker, and she doesn’t want to throw her money away on the slots like the other waitresses. Just inside the door there’s a bank of video poker machines. She sits down at the first open one, an old machine with ghosts of cards burned into the screen. She slides in a twenty, the only cash she has. The game is Jacks or Better.

  After ten minutes she’s lost most of her money. She knows her uncle would tell her to stop while she still has enough for a pack of cigarettes. What keeps her playing isn’t a feeling of luck, but something more dangerous: the feeling of having nothing to lose.

  She presses a button and the machine deals her two spades, the nine and ten, and three diamonds, the jack, queen, and king—a straight. She can feel her life changing. A man walks up beside her. He is thin and sallow, with combed-back hair. His eyes are hard; he isn’t smiling. “Go for it,” he says, his voice low and serious. Elle thinks he must know something. She decides to draw to her diamonds. And sure enough, the miracle that will ruin her: the ten and ace appear. A buzzer goes off. People in the casino look up. The other waitresses, her new friends, leave their machines and come over. “What nerve,” they say, “to go for the royal!” She beams and clutches her pay ticket. Her heart is beating all the way into her fingertips.

  She looks around for her mystery man, but he is lost in the crowd, so completely gone she wonders if he was ever there at all.

  Dusty never talks at the supper table. He doodles in his memo pad and waits for his father to call.

  One night Elle has had enough. “I asked you not to do that,” she says, and snatches the pad away. The pages are covered with drawings of guitars, cutaways like Roland’s. The drawings are tiny and perfect and make Elle even angrier.

  She changes her strategy, increases her bets. She stays out later every morning. Some days she doesn’t get home until noon, and by then she is almost too tired to sleep. She closes the thick rubber shades that make her room look like night. She turns on a floor fan to filter out noise. The fan sounds like an ocean. It makes her think of California, and of Roland. During her first year with him, they went through her inheritance. She wonders if it’s possible to win back everything she has lost.

  A week after Dusty’s eighth birthday, a package arrives in the mail: Roland’s old jean jacket. Dusty loves it. Elle has never seen him love anything so much. He insists on wearing it every day, even in the heat. It swallows him, makes him look small and lost.

  A royal should come up on averag
e about once every forty thousand hands, so sooner or later she’s bound to hit another one. The key is speed. The faster she plays, the sooner she’ll win. So far she has used up her initial winnings and is down a thousand, but she isn’t discouraged. She doesn’t think of losing as losing, she thinks of it as investing, preparing to win again.

  She always plays the same machine. It’s comfortable, the seat far enough from the screen that she can see all the cards without moving her head. She uses both hands on the deal and hold buttons. She builds up credits so that she isn’t constantly pumping in money.

  If she doesn’t stop to eat or smoke, she can play six hundred games an hour.

  Roland says he wants to be a family again. He’s moving to Reno. Elle has to remind herself that this is what she’s been waiting for.

  Her uncle rents them an apartment. He wants to help them the way Roland’s parents helped them in California, when they were first taking Dusty to doctors.

  The apartment is half of a duplex, a small, flat building on a street of small flat buildings with chain-link fences and skinny, creaking cottonwood trees and dogs that bare their teeth when they bark. Each side of the duplex has its own garage. Elle and Roland have never had a garage. It’s small and dark like their apartment, and airless, barely wide enough for a single car, but it has an automatic door and automatic lights.

  Their one bit of affluence.

  Elle’s uncle sets Roland up in a training course for slot technicians. He says it’s important for a man to feel like he can support his family, and slot techs make good money. Roland says to Elle, “I’m too old to be going back to school.” He’s forty-two. In the time they’ve been apart, not quite a year, he’s begun to go bald like his father. Elle doesn’t mind. It’s a relief to know that from now on, she will look better than him. He can be the one who worries.