Opposite rows of maple trees arch over the wide lane vanishing towards the blue horizon. Ecstatic chirps, beating out against slight throats, sound all around the maze of branches in the warm sunlight.
We have driven to the Santa Monica flats, to a bungalow on 7th Street, south of San Vicente. Number 675. It's white wood face slammed against the street.
My father walks up the brick steps. He climbs to a small porch and presses a dull yellow doorbell cased in brown plastic. A warped form materializes in the dimpled panels of stained glass cutting an arc in the front door.
"Teresa!" My father calls out. I offer her a weak wave behind him. A storm of orange curls reaches for my hand; two glinting eyes light up in my reflection. Teresa has a round face where every feature is growing thicker with age, except for her small squat nose, seeming to get more squashed between the mounds of cheek that consume her rosy skin. She has carefully plucked out all of her eyebrows and has filled them in with dark pencil. They seem trapped there, above her puffy eyes. Teresa's lips fight gravity and stretch up with a brisk smile.
"Come, come in. Carl'yn has been waiting for you." She ushers us inside with her thick Scottish accent.
Teresa leads us to a small room draped in velvet crusted wallpaper. Everywhere, like a gallery, photographs of her family line the walls, the shelves, the mantle. Stoic boys, all in military dress, and red headed women in white nurses uniform, pose in frames of every form and fashion: small, round, square, metal, wood. Frames are mounted on the wallpaper, propped behind the plaid blankets on the couches, tucked on every square inch of counter space. So many eyes, I'm not sure it's me who's looking at them.
The three of us move into a dim corridor, walking on a course of overlapping oriental rugs. My father ducks to avoid the fan.
"Carl'yn Dear, someone's come to see you, Luv!" Her voice rises, then falls again. "Go in, she's just had her lunch."
I shuffle on, tripping on the fold between rugs. Teresa puts her kind hand on my shoulder. "Now Dear, look who I've brought you!"
She sits there, a small bundle of robes devoured by the soft padded space around her. A tray is positioned beside her chair, holding a sandwich without crusts, a glass of milk, a remote control. The wood cabinet housing a television is five feet from her slippered feet. Teresa zaps the mute button and resets the remote on the armrest, tapping my grandmother's silent hand.
A sliding glass door frames my grandmother's world. From her view into the yard, she can watch a black dog on a chain as it stalks about his patch, guarding the shrubs along the fence.
I reach for this hand of crumpled fingers, knobby with bones nearly visible through her skin. Her hand does not tense in the warm pressure of mine. There is no reply, no tactility, just the same idle pose as if lying on the rest, as though she does not feel me trying to hold onto her. What is there to hold on to? A mass of pink robes huddled in a chair, sinking farther down in her seat.
I pat the white hair brushed flat along her scalp and tied in a child's ponytail. A strange smile peeks from her small face as she shifts her eyes, dull in the television screen, onto me, the person patting her head.
Teresa's rolling accent comes as a comfort. "Now, Carl'yn, show your granddaughter what you 'ave for her."
She does not move, but looks at Teresa with agonized sincerity, discomforted by the large bodies towering around her. My father bends down and kisses her forehead. "Hi Mom."
Teresa asks my father if he wants a spot of brandy.
"No, thanks. I'm fine." It is ten thirty in the morning.
"Does your pretty daughter want one? She looks about old enough to have a taste."
"That's okay," I respond through a taut smile, "I'm fine."
"Well, then you don't mind, Luv, if I get one for myself. Would either of you like anythin' else?"
"Orange juice, please," I reply in automatic response, "If you have any."
"Of course." Teresa shoots into the kitchen. My father follows her, leaving me alone with this soft bundled body.
Grandma had always squeezed fresh orange juice from the trees in her yard. Her secret was to slice an extra orange into bits and add the morsels to the pitcher. She let me help her when I was old enough to handle a knife. I stood on a chair so I could reach the counter.
Grandma would bring everything out to us on a tray, and watch us scamper around the ravine from her sun chair on the patio. Sasha, her white shepherd, always curled down beside her.
Teresa reemerges with a tinkling bar glass. "No orange juice, but I'll fetch some from the market for next time. I do remember now how much Carl'yn likes it."
"How is everything going?" My father inquires.
"Carl'yn is quite happy here," she assures us.
My father rustles in his coat pocket and hands me a slender jewelry case embossed with the words,Add a Pearl Necklace, in Victorian script. "Grandma wants you to have this," he says. "It was hers when she was your age."
Inside, spread out like a smile against cream satin, rests a fine gold chain beaded with miniature pearls. "You add one for each new year of your life."
They have a slight and precious feel through my fingers as the cool pearls pool in my palm. I can imagine her fidgeting the clasp as she sits on the edge of her bed, the pearls hanging transparent, like white caviar settling around her neck. The necklace disappears into her skin, except for glimmers on her collarbone as she moves through the saffron lamplight of her room, folding her stockings into the case, zipping her make-up in a bag. She must have loved the frail string, like an exquisite detail lost on those who are not paying attention.
I hand the necklace to my grandmother. She strokes the pearls in her hands like capsules of memory.
She must have worn them as she packed her things into that second-hand suitcase and hurried to the station, worn them as she stepped fresh off the bus on a one way ticket out of the cornfields and the church choirs, and into the stage lights of Hollywood.
Someone had known she deserved such a beautiful thing when she was tucked away in that Midwest town. She had played Miranda in the school gymnasium; she had modeled Macy's hats on the weekend. She was always the most beautiful in her class when she played the piano in the winter recital. One day she stole herself away to the bright coast of California. She was drawn to the excitement of the movies, towards a world charmed with glamour and fantasy, a world that could offer her spirit some affirmation of beauty.
Carolyn had playful years as a chorus girl in Busby Berkely musicals, one more shining face in a long line of legs and a string of arms gently grasping the next waist. She posed for glove advertisements, holding a covered hand against her cheek in the soft lit lens. Her life seemed so unblemished, so cinematic, as though there was never a struggle for survival, but a floating. She was compelled to touch that mercurial luminosity beyond celebrity or stardom, into enchantment. She believed in that beautiful world above all else. Even if she ate from soup cans and carried bus fare in her penny purse and curbed constant advancements for bit parts from two-bit agents, none of that was remembered. She trusted the immaculate dream of this silver age carving out a history in a young Los Angeles.
Allan was a young lawyer from New York City. He left the east to cash in on the heating star of television. Allen met Carolyn outside an MGM set. She called him "Pinky" because of the rosy blush of his cheeks. He called it love.
A few months later, the Los Angeles Times caption read, "La vie en rose. Producer Allen Miller spends honeymoon in Riviera with young wife, Carolyn Foster." The photo shows a burnished beauty in tiny pearls clutching a tall man's arm. Her wrap skirt flutters behind her and she holds down her wide brimmed hat, smiling on the windy steps of a grand hotel.
My brother and I, six and eight respectively, were running reckless around the yard, teasing Sasha and tugging at her ears. I looked back at her watching us. She stood there, so lovely, turning her stoic face, framed by gently whitening hair. With her, there was never the scrupulous quest for allure, never a vain need for adornments or masks. There was never the frantic grapple for beauty; she embodied it.
Carolyn and Allen raised their family in a shaded home in Bel Air. My father, Steven, came first, then Kathleen, then Andrew. The house spread out across the land in refined lines, echoing Frank Lloyd Wright's decade in Hollywood. Tucked behind a circular driveway, the house held no curves, no arches, only firm angles of white marble and glass spreading low along the horizon. As we came up upon it, the slim gates opened, and the house would extend before us in a balanced wingspan.
I tumble out of the car and race to the black doors. Inside, I hear her closing the oven. She crosses the white carpet, stretching past her grand piano, past the pale linen sofas, the sheet of glass letting in the view of the ravine like a flickering mural framing her. She opens the large door as I collapse into her knees. How many times has she made that long gracious cross over the white carpet?
"One time, we were celebrating Kathleen's birthday at the house," she whispered in my ear as I cradled in her lap on the patio chair. "Someone rang the bell. Pinky tells me to get it, and when I open the door, who's there, but Cary Grant! Mr. Grant waltzes in and asks to meet the birthday girl. Kathleen just about fainted. Allen had planned it all along, his great secret. I think they were working on a film together."
I would have loved to hide deep in that white carpet beneath the piano, like my father had done, watching her mingle with American royalty about that pale room! To have peeked into her dream, the one she had envisioned from her hometown bed, rolling those soft pearls in her sleepless hands.
The first image I have of the grandmother, she sits against the black piano, waving me towards her. She laughs as she closes me in her arms, her tender gem. I am her name sake, her sole granddaughter, her oldest grandchild. I adored her. She never propped me up in bows or ruffled dresses. Every Friday she would pick me up from day school in her cream convertible, whizzing me through carpool traffic with a scarf wrapped about her head, the ends fluttering diaphanous behind her. I would fiddle with her sunglasses, letting the large frames tip over the bridge of my nose. I was alive beside her, my grandmother, my special and most beautiful friend.
Then the Christmas came when Grandpa Allen fell ill. She urged us to go to Tennessee and visit my mother's family.
My mother's grandfather, and his second wife, Mary Alice, meet us at the Chattanooga airport. They drive us up the winding mountain road in a Lincoln so wide the whole family could line up along the dashboard. Mary Alice turns down the radio and gossips about all the dramas weaving themselves through every face we might encounter at the "club." She is the major hen of her roost in the small coup of Look Out Mountain.
Snow trickles on the wispy trees around the property. Inside, the floors are laid in slick wood. Mary Alice tells us to stay put while she settles in "the grown-ups." As my brother slides his socked feet along the foyer, he knocks into a commode and a vase bobbles, smartly ending that enterprise. We fidget on stiff furniture leaned up against a mirrored wall staring back at us on all sides. The chairs manage to be quite intimidating, despite their small stature, much like Mary Alice herself. The faint smell of greasy hors d'ouerves roam the house.
Mary Alice eventually comes back for us. She enters the dark hall with back light from a distant window, surrounding her in a halo. I first make out the gold belt drooped around a nylon jumpsuit blistering with tropical blossoms. Her salmon nails clutch the constant plastic cup, snug in a gold wicker holder, clinking with gin drenched ice cubes. Her lime green sling backs clack against the wood floor. She motions us up with her other hand, skinny as the Virginia Slims it sways through the smoky air. "Up! Up! Lets go, lets go." Her words hiss in a croaky southern tongue. Mary Alice informs us that we are going to her daughter, Emmy's house, since the club doesn't "really allow children."
"They won't let us go with you." I tug on my father's coat as we walk to the Lincoln.
"If I'd known, we'd have made other plans, Pumpkin," he says, patting my shoulder. "It'll be all right."
They drop us off at a big brick house. A waterlogged trampoline peaks between the trees in the side yard. Mary Alice scoots us up to the front door. Her bird thin body pecks along. She knocks. We are met by two snarling teens.
"These are the twins. Frank," motioning to her right, "and Mary Alice." Oh no, another one. "They'll watch over you. We'll come back around eleven." Mary Alice gives the twins endearing kisses and closes the door behind her, abandoning us to their mercy.
Judging from the portrait series lining the hallway, the twins are the last in a long, long line of children. They feed us hot dogs and ketchup. My brother and I get a kick out of the electric massage chair in Mr. Haney's office, so they lock us in there for a few hours. When I finally figure out how to free us, I realize we're alone in this big house. The two of us roam around until we find the kitchen. All the lights are off. Eventually, we muster enough courage to walk down the narrow staircase to the basement. I make my brother go down first, he being much smaller than I, and thus less appetizing to monsters. He creeps down, reaches for the door, and open it. Someone yells Frank's name. Mary Alice wrangles us inside.
We find ourselves in some kind of hangout, with pool table, dart board, and Spuds Mackenzie poster. Five or six strangers mill through the sliding doors between the den and the pool deck. Mary Alice adds another bottle to the collection of musty alcohol stashed under the sink, then plops us in front of the Nintendo.
Someone unravels a plastic bag causing commotion around the card table. The big kids settle on the couches. Frank nudges Patrick's shoulder . My brother puts down the controller.
"You guys want some weed?"
"Stop it Frank, they're like eight years old."
"They're from California. I thought everybody smokes out there." Frank busts up with laughter. "Come on, Pat, try some," he takes the joint from his friend and holds it out to my brother.
"What's that?" Patrick takes the sticky paper. "Oh, its hot!" He drops it.
Frank collects it for him. "It's okay, big guy." Frank speaks gently, "Just take a little hit." Frank puts the joint in my brother's mouth. "Okay --- now inhale." Patrick closes his eyes and sucks in. A Cheshire grin spreads on Frank's face, anticipating Patrick's cough and collapse to the carpet. Frank rubs Pat's back. "That wasn't so bad."
"A smirk escapes the young Mary Alice. Frank gestures over to me. I nod a resolute no and watch the spliff makes the rounds while the room fills with smoke.
"Let's go outside," someone suggests. Everyone snatches up various brown bottles from the tables and moves to the deck. I sit a ways off, scratching my legs on the gravely diving board. Under a slip of moonlight, I trickle my toes over the edge of the board, watching sluggish mosquitoes shiver across the pool. Opposite me, the big kids, sheltered in light from the house, clump together, smoking, while my brother entertains them with Pee Wee Herman impressions.
Grandma tried not to let anything seem different when we came home. But it was. When she opened the door, I couldn't race over the free white stretch of carpet to the kitchen. I had to make the procession through the room where he lay, ashen in that metal bed. I did not like looking at him, at his gray skin, or his sinking eyes. The room filled with his spooky shadow wearing blue pinstripe pajamas, monogrammed with a cursive "P" for Pinky on the breast pocket.
"It's a shame you'll never remember him before he was sick," my father said to me years later. But there are moments held in my memory besides those last hours. Moments filled with her in them.
I was her special girl and she was the goddess who protected me. She swept me up in her luminous world imagined through a soft lit lens.
There is a storm, mud churns through the Topanga canyons, ravaging the hills. My mother yanks us from our bunks in the rainy night, puts us into a dark car, and careens us down the slick road. The furry of windshield wipers splashes muck across the glass. We reach the chopping ocean, turn up Sunset blvd., and begin the gentle coast through the hills to her sheltering gates.
She wraps me in a warm towel and draws me a bath. We watch the water cascade from the silver spout. Her satin robe spreads on the edge of the smooth marble, dissolving in the subtle planes edging the bathtub. I stay forever. We comb one another's hair, make tea, play the piano. I am her small echo. And she is of mythic birth, the fair-eyed Vesta. She treads her large room with the white carpet, escorted by her white shepherd, quicksilver in the moonlight. She blesses me, a gawky little echo, to share her quiet world.
My father knocks on the door to fetch me home. I open up to a Darth Vader mask looming above me (a prank Pinky would have appreciated). I shriek and cower behind her. Dad has to drag me screaming back to the car. Carolyn makes him leave the mask with her.
When did she become mortal? The shift must have been so slight when it did not feel so good anymore to be inside her skin. She kept repeating this same story about me begging for a toy car. This elfish laugh followed. So bizarre, her fixations. Each time I came to her, growing into my own life, inspired by things I'd learned, I'd seen, places I'd gone, boys I'd met, all these things I was desperate to tell her -- all she could see was the three year old girl begging for a toy car.
My brother and I would bet how long it would take after we walked in the door before she told the story.
Then she didn't tell the story anymore.
Black writing began to appear on the walls. Little notes like "turn off lights," "flush" or "shut door tightly" drawn directly on the paint. She defiled her perfect pale walls with her scratches.
My father decided that she couldn't handle the big house alone. Teresa came to live with her. Then she went to live with Teresa.
It must have been so hard for her to see her beauty go, the one thing she clutched to as her passport through this world, the thing that gave her grace in life. Having to watch it slip away, the mercurial luminosity beading up and dribbling off the white screen, vanishing into vapors.
The faint moments of her life, accumulating, in frames of black and white. Then the reel runs out, drags along the spool; the lights cut off, and she is in darkness.
At least now, when she catches her reflection in the television screen, staring endless hours at the dull specter, she is not haunted by her fading. She can no longer remember her bloom, shielded by forget. She is the fragment of a woman huddled in a stranger's room, with pictures of a foreign family on the walls around her and a black dog tethered in the yard.
I worshipped her but I was not enough to sustain her.
She holds the pearl necklace in her hands. Each snowy sphere, so simple to loose, to slip through a crack, so simple to sweep into a dusty corner, unnoticed, contains all of her.
I wear her necklace, and I bear her name.
© 2002 Carolyn Anderson Miller, all rights reserved
appears here by permission
Image Fair-Eyed Vesta created by and © K.L.Storer, all rights reserved
appears here by permission
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