Windfalls: A Novel Read online

  “You have to go to school,” Cerise answered. “The new rules say if there’s a minor who’s not in school, the assistance unit will lose that portion of their aid.”

  “What the fuck’s an assistance unit?”

  “Don’t use that type language around the baby. An assistance unit’s a family—like us.”

  “I hate school.”

  “You have to finish high school,” Cerise repeated. “You don’t need to do things the hard way, like me. With your brains and looks, you—”

  “Brains and looks—” Melody tossed her hair down her back and straightened up to face her mother. “Get real. What kind of stupid TV la-la land do you live in, anyway? I’m not going to get one goddamned chance—”

  “You’ve got to take it,” Cerise pleaded. “You’ve got to make it for yourself.”

  “Look,” Melody said, spitting out the word as though it were rotten, “I could be a good girl. I could go to school and study until I’m fucking blue in the face. I could get good grades. And maybe if I’m real good and I’m real lucky, I can go to the community college, too. Oh, goody.

  “And then,” Melody went on nastily, “I can bust my butt and work two jobs and study a bunch of meaningless shit and get a little piece of paper so I can work my ass off at some stupidfucking job for the rest of my life. Thank you very much, and no fucking way. I hate school. School’s a hoax.”

  “Your report card came in the mail yesterday,” Cerise said. “You’re failing every subject.”

  Melody spun around, “No way. What about art? I got an A in art.”

  “Art’s not a subject.”

  “What?”

  “English is a subject,” Cerise said. “Math is a subject. History is a subject. Science is a subject. Art is like—PE. Or band. It’s not anything real. Not real work.”

  “I work hard at art.”

  “What—taking apart toasters? Drawing pictures of Dumpsters? If I were your art teacher, you’d fail that, too.”

  “I can’t believe this.” Melody rolled her eyes toward the ceiling as though up there she would find an impartial judge.

  “Art,” Cerise said, “is not going to get you anywhere.”

  “Oh, right. Like you’re an expert on how to get somefuckingwhere.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do, right now. Get somewhere. And,” Cerise said loudly, to drown out the waver of terror in her voice, “I’m going to take you with me.”

  SIX WEEKS AFTER ELIOT WAS DENIED TENURE, ANNA STOOD IN FRONT OF the bathroom sink, a pink-tipped plastic wand dangling in her hand. She leaned toward the mirror, and the face that met hers there was strained and stunned. Dark half-moons hung beneath her eyes, harsh lines framed her mouth, and the flesh of her cheeks looked soft and pulpy. Catching her lower lip between her teeth, she pressed it until she felt the hurt, wished she had the courage to bite for blood. Her eyes sought their reflection as if she still hoped she might find some kind of answer there. But her eyes were only holes that led directly to her brain, and her brain was only a meaty tangle of despair.

  A little plastic vial half filled with urine sat on the counter in front of her. She picked it up, emptied its contents into the toilet, and closed the lid. She fitted the vial and the wand back into the box they had come in and tucked the box beneath the other trash at the bottom of the wastebasket, where no one else would see it. Then she sat down on the toilet, buried her face in her hands, and tried to think.

  She was at least eight weeks along—maybe as much as ten, or even twelve. When she first realized that her period was late, she’d assumed she’d been so worried about what was happening with Eliot that she’d made a mistake about the dates, and later, when her period still hadn’t started, she’d thought it was stress that was keeping it away, had thought that stress was making her feel weary and nauseous and uneasy.

  But now the pink line claimed otherwise.

  “I don’t know who’s the bigger fool,” Eliot said back in February when he’d told Anna the news about his job. “Me, for thinking I could get away with working on a project that might take half a century to show results, or the college, for pretending they can stick to quick fixes, even now.”

  They were in the kitchen, where Anna was fixing supper and Lucy was making a cottage for Noranella beneath the breakfast table. Still in his jacket, Eliot stood in the middle of the room and said, “One-third of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion in the last forty years, and Spaulding University denies me tenure because they claim my research doesn’t show adequate relevance.”

  “They’re wrong,” Anna answered, wiping her hands on a dish towel and reaching for him. “We both know that. Besides, your teaching evaluations are the best in the department.”

  “Teaching doesn’t matter to a tenuring committee,” Eliot answered. He gave her a perfunctory hug and moved away. “We know that, too. Nothing matters really, except funding. And,” he went on bitterly, “there’s lots more money available for splicing mouse genes into tomatoes than there is for developing perennial wheat.”

  “Yes, but—”

  Eliot interrupted her. “The bottom line is that I’ve lost my job.” His voice was harsh, but his expression was so desolate it frightened her. “I have no idea what we’ll do,” he said, staring past her to the window above the sink.

  “We’ll think of something,” Anna said. “We still have my job. We’ll find something else for you.”

  “Not around here,” Eliot answered grimly. “Not unless they’re hiring genetics professors to flip burgers at McDonald’s.”

  “We’ll find something,” Anna promised through all her fears. “We’ll work it out. It will be okay.”

  “What’s wrong?” inquired Lucy’s voice from beneath the table. “What happened?” Poking her head out from between the blankets she’d draped over the tabletop, she asked, “What will be okay?”

  “Everything will be okay,” Anna answered, picking up her knife and trying to resume her work on the salad. “It’s just that things have changed a little.”

  “What changed?” Lucy asked, her face scrunched with concern.

  “I said this might happen,” Eliot said, ignoring his daughter and speaking to his wife. “But I guess I never thought it really would.”

  “It shouldn’t have,” Anna said staunchly.

  Eliot said, “We’d have to move, for me to get another job. Or at least I would,” he’d added tentatively. Startled, Anna looked up from her work. “Only you?” she asked.

  “Have you thought about all you’d be leaving, if you moved, too?” he answered.

  It was a question that left her dizzy. Of course she’d thought about what might happen if Eliot didn’t get tenure, but only dimly, only from a distance. Eliot was too good a scientist, too well respected by his colleagues and his students for her to believe he could really lose his job. In a way it had even seemed wrong for her to think too much about it, as if imagining the worst would somehow cause it to happen. But suddenly a hot anxiety bubbled up inside her. This is real, she thought.

  Her eyes swept the room and settled on the window above the kitchen sink. Outside, sunset was burnishing the frozen hills. For as long as she could remember she had loved that view, loved the way the seasons moved across it and the way it looked in every light. She thought of the show she was preparing for—in the most prestigious gallery she’d shown in yet—and once again it struck her how entirely her art depended on what lay outside her kitchen window. She thought of all the photographs she still wanted to make of that land—hundreds of photographs—each one leading to the next like an endless magic, like the inexhaustible pasta pot in the story that was Lucy’s current favorite. She thought of her own job at the university, of her colleagues and her students and her friends. She thought of Sally and Mike in Salish and her parents so close by, in Spokane.

  She thought, I’d lose everything if I left.

  Lucy said, “Are we moving away from here?” Her voice sounded app
alled.

  Anna tore her gaze from the window, looked blindly around the room until she met Eliot’s eyes. For a moment she didn’t know him, he seemed so tired and sad, so stricken and alone. She looked down at Lucy, standing waist-high in front of her, the worry on her face deepening as she waited for an answer.

  “We might have to move,” Anna answered, squandering every other future and looking directly at Eliot as she spoke. To Lucy she added gently, “We don’t yet know.”

  Lucy asked, “Who will live our lives, if we move?”

  “They’ll always be our lives,” said Anna, infusing her voice with more certainty than she felt. She wiped her hands on a dishcloth and reached her arms around Lucy. “We’ll take our lives with us, when we go.”

  In that moment she felt a kind of triumph, a surge of hope. She promised, “As long as we’re all together, everything will be all right.” But then Lucy squirmed out from under Anna’s hug to stand alone in the center of the room. “Noranella won’t go,” she said.

  “Why won’t she?” Eliot asked, reaching for Anna’s empty hand.

  “Noranella won’t leave her home,” Lucy answered.

  “Oh, Lucy,” Anna begged foolishly. “You could make her come.”

  “I can’t,” Lucy had answered with great dignity. “I would not never do such a increnulating thing to Noranella.”

  “Lucy,” said Eliot wearily, “people can feel two ways about a thing.”

  “Not Noranella,” Lucy answered, folding her arms like a grown woman and turning away.

  Now, alone in the bathroom, Anna raised her head from the cradle of her hands and looked around the room. She saw the collection of Eliot’s starts and cuttings that lined the windowsill, saw the piles of bath toys and the towels hanging crookedly on the rack, but no meanings for those things registered in her brain. The plastic wand had appeared so innocuous when she’d taken it from the package, like a child’s toy or a game piece, like a baby’s rattle. Thinking of it now, she felt an odd little tug of temptation, like a strain of far-off music. She resisted the urge to dig through the trash, find the box she’d buried there, and look at the wand again.

  It was all impossible.

  It would be impossible for her to have a baby if she couldn’t take time off work to care for it. But it would be impossible for her to ask for a leave of absence from the university now that her job would soon be their sole support. It was impossible for her to finish the photographs for her Los Angeles show if she couldn’t work in the darkroom, but it was impossible for her to work in the darkroom without exposing a developing embryo to poisonous chemicals and heavy metals. It was unthinkable to cancel such an important show, but it would be impossible to finish it if she were pregnant.

  If Eliot were miraculously offered another position somewhere, she could not ask him to turn it down just because she didn’t want to move, especially since Eliot was already battling such brutal failure. But she could not imagine moving with a newborn, could not imagine having another baby without the support of her family and friends.

  It was all impossible. It would be insane and irresponsible and wrong for her to bring a baby into the world right now. So she had to stop it. For the good of their family—for Eliot’s sake, for Lucy’s, and for her own—she had to send that little possibility back to where it had come from, like a misdelivered letter, like a message that had been meant for someone else.

  It would take courage and some contriving, but she thought she could manage it so that no one else would ever have the burden of knowing what she’d had to do. She could make the necessary appointments for times when Eliot was at work. She could schedule the procedure for an afternoon when she had no classes to teach, could arrange for Lucy to go home from kindergarten with a friend that day. That evening she could claim she’d come down with the flu and go to bed. With the work and stress of all that was facing them, it wouldn’t be too difficult to keep from making love until she’d healed. Later, she promised herself, when things were more settled, they could have another baby—just not right now.

  But before she could stop herself, she was thinking about babies, was remembering how delicious newborns were, at once so goofy-looking and so wise. She remembered Lucy as an infant and as a round-cheeked toddler, remembered her imp’s grin and her wide-open eyes. She thought of Lucy now, how utterly herself she was, how inevitable she seemed, and how crucial, and she felt the lust for a baby rise up in her, that craving that defied all logic. Suddenly and beyond all reason, she wanted a baby’s flesh, a baby’s scent, wanted the promise and comfort of a baby.

  We could make it work, she pleaded with herself. Pressing her palm against her abdomen, she let herself imagine the bean-sprout-size embryo hidden there, let herself wonder what kind of person was rising toward the world. She remembered the drifting bit of tissue she’d allowed the doctor to excise, remembered how lovely it had been, and how lorn, and she felt a surge of mother-worry to think of the long hours she’d been spending in the darkroom, of the dektol and selenium that little sprout had already been exposed to. Stop it, she thought sternly—remember how impossible it is. But already, in some far-off, treacherous corner of her being, she was aware of an inordinate delight. She felt a welcome widening inside her, and also a splinter of reckless thrill, to see the future veer so far from her control.

  CERISE FOUND A TWO-BEDROOM TRAILER AS CLOSE TO THE COMMUNITY college as she could afford, in a little pocket of a trailer court crammed with weeds and dust and broken cars. She packed their things in grocery sacks and liquor boxes, and Jake came up in a borrowed pickup to help her move. He brought a dozen red roses for Cerise, a bottle of light-sensitive fingernail polish for Melody, a half-rack of Bud for himself, and a battery-operated laser power blaster for Travis, who spent the afternoon in amped-out ecstasy, pulling the trigger and shrieking gleefully each time lights flashed inside the plastic barrel and an electronic voice announced Attention. Drop your guns. Fire. Target.

  Cerise felt a twinge of sadness to leave the apartment that had been their home, though as she rode through Rossi for the final time, crammed into the pickup cab with Jake and Travis and Melody, she looked out the window at the new malls and dirty palms, and it seemed strange to think she had ever lived there at all.

  The trailer was half the size of their apartment. The appliances in the kitchen would have fit inside a playhouse—the refrigerator with a freezer that couldn’t hold a quart of ice cream, the stove with its two burners and its doll-size oven. Cerise let Melody have the bedroom at the back, and she and Travis shared the one in front, although it was so small that her mattress and his crib were only a few steps apart.

  At the drugstore where she went to buy diapers and toilet paper and shampoo she found flower seeds on sale, ten cents a package. She bought a dollar’s worth and planted them below their bedroom window, studying the directions on the envelopes and then breaking up the hard dirt with a hand trowel, patting the seeds carefully beneath the soil, and watering them with pans of water she carried from the kitchen sink. She caught Travis trying to dig them up again the next day, but by midsummer a few of the sweet peas had begun to bloom, and one of the zinnias had developed buds that looked like thick green thumbs.

  The first time she went on campus, she kept waiting for someone to realize she shouldn’t be there and tell her she had to leave. Weathering Melody’s scorn, she dressed for her first class even more carefully than she’d dressed for her dates with Jake. But even so her hands felt as slick as if they’d been in rubber gloves all day, and she kept her elbows pressed to her sides to try to hide the perspiration that steeped dark circles into the armpits of her blouse. Unsure of where she was going, she hurried along the crowded sidewalks, her new textbooks pushed against her breasts as though she were twelve again.

  But she managed to stumble into the right classroom. And she managed to come back the next day. Slowly her terror began to ease, and she even started to think that maybe her program counselor was right—maybe
anything was possible, if you only tried hard enough, if only you wanted it with all your might.

  What she liked best about school were the hours she spent with the preschoolers in the on-campus day care. Once the children got to know her, they ran to greet her whenever she arrived, lifting their arms and faces to her like clamoring sunflowers. They filled her lap at circle time, showed her their invisible owies, told her rambling stories about the dreams they’d had and the videos they’d seen. And halfway through the summer her mentor teacher said Cerise must be some sort of magician, the way she could get them to settle down at naptime.

  Despite how angry Melody had been about the move, she also seemed to be doing a little better that summer. She watched Travis while Cerise was in school and found an evening job at a fast-food restaurant not too far from where they lived. She made new friends—not, this time, with leather-clad kids who owned loud cars, but with a pack of dreamy teenagers in ragged clothes. These new friends went barefoot, wrote poetry, and wore their pale hair matted into dreadlocks, though some of the girls shaved their heads and some of the boys wore skirts.

  Melody said their goal was to save the earth. She said they wanted to live the way people were meant to live, at one with nature, in tribes. They called themselves the Lost Children, which made Cerise think of the movie Peter Pan, though when she mentioned it, Melody reminded her scornfully that in the movie it had been only boys.

  By the Fourth of July, Melody said she was in love with one of them, a willowy boy with raven-colored ringlets that Melody called Tree. He owned an old school bus that Melody helped him paint, covering it with sinuous flowers and dark-eyed animals and geometric patterns she said had sacred meanings. Tree also had a tattoo gun, and he sold tattoos at concerts and street fairs. Melody told Cerise that sometimes Tree used her designs for his tattoos, and she claimed she was going to start her own business soon, airbrushing those designs on T-shirts and silk scarves and canvas bags.