Chapter Four

On Sunday morning, Eleanor rose early, hauled Sasha’s mountain bike out of the basement of the apartment building and, cycled the short distance to Runyon Canyon Park, just beyond the Hollywood Bowl. There she locked up the bike and began to jog up the trail, full CamelBak hydration pack strapped to her back.

Her first run in L.A. a decade earlier, when she’d visited Sasha the Thanksgiving after they graduated, had ended badly—as in vomiting and dehydration. Sasha had tried to warn her ahead of time that the heat was only a symptom of the real danger: aridity. Despite the palm trees and the distant sea you could visit if you were willing to brave freeway traffic or surface streets, L.A. was a desert. And people died in the desert all the time.

“Remember, you’re from Vermont,” Sasha had cautioned. “Your pores won’t know what hit them.”

Eleanor now knew to take more water than seemed necessary, to drink copious amounts as she ran, and to jog more slowly than she truly liked. In this way, she could enjoy her workout without experiencing the ill effects of dehydration, which, as a pale-skinned northern Vermonter, she seemed particularly prone to. Another reason she would be glad to leave Southern California for grad school.

So far she’d received two acceptances and four rejections. The schools that wanted her were Cornell and Stanford—on clear opposite sides of the country as well as in exceedingly different climactic and cultural environments. The one thing the two universities had in common was that both were only offering her partial funding. She knew why, but the slight still stung. Because she’d finished undergrad so long ago, technically she would be a “returning student”—one who was stepping away from an existing career to consider a new one, rather than a newbie with little life experience. Jack Mills, her Smith mentor, had explained that most programs accepted older applicants with mixed feelings. On the one hand, students like Eleanor had valuable experience to contribute to their studies. On the other, returning students could be especially stubborn and intractable. The older they were, the less likely they were to kowtow to their professors’ opinions, and the hierarchy of graduate school depended on at least a modicum of blind obedience.

Assuming the last program rejected her (it probably would—Wisconsin-Madison had one of the top programs in the country; out of an average of 250 applicants, they accepted exactly six new students each year), Eleanor was going to have to decide between being broke in the Bay Area or impoverished in Upstate New York. She was leaning toward Stanford, and not just because its program more closely matched what she wanted to do, with a focus on developmental and pre-adolescent psych. The Bay Area was West Coast progressive, close to L.A. and Sasha (her roommate had vowed to never again reside outside of Southern California), and offered a vibrant lesbian community where several friends from college currently resided.

Still, Palo Alto was considerably farther away from her sister and father than she wanted to be, not to mention a thousand times more expensive than Ithaca. If she had to borrow so much money that her future career plans would be hostage to her student loans, the pedagogical difference between the two programs would be neutralized. She had just finished paying off her undergraduate loans a year earlier—her indentured servitude, as she had referred to the three hundred dollar payment automatically deducted from her bank account each month. Once, and once only, she had done the math: three hundred dollar a month for one hundred and eighteen months (she’d paid the balance off two months early) came to $35,400. A down payment on the house she didn’t own, or, at least, a really nice car. She’d been so elated to finally pay off the last few hundred dollars that she was now loathe to voluntarily return to a similar state of vassalage.

As she ran up the wide, dusty trail at the edge of Runyon Canyon, early morning sun strong on her shoulders, she debated her options. Was there some way she could make a bunch of cash in a short time? There was always stripping, a field surprisingly dominated by lesbians. She was fit, but her breasts were small. Running kept her lean, a trait typically not prized in the exotic dancing field. Besides, she possessed the usual feminist aversion to participating in an industry based on the objectification of the feminine form, not to mention a commercial enterprise that encouraged violence against women. If she resorted to stripping, she would always feel like a cautionary real-life CSI story waiting to happen—a smart girl who needed money for school, found strangled to death behind the downtown L.A. club where she pole-danced four nights a week. She grimaced at the thought and took a generous gulp of water. The Northeast Kingdomite in her didn’t like seedy urban places. She preferred evergreen forests, ancient rock walls, clear freshwater lakes, black bears who mauled your trash if you didn’t keep animal-proof containers.

Nearly to the top of the mile-long climb up the rim of the canyon, she dodged a pair of panting yellow labs (Runyon was off-leash paradise) and slowed slightly. All of this thinking was causing her to run faster than was likely good for her in the heat. As she followed the trail east, she gazed over the city spread out below. The neat grid-like streets of Hollywood gradually gave way to the high-rises of downtown L.A, surprisingly unhazy on this spring morning. From this vantage point, the city looked clean, bright, futuristic. She knew better. Perhaps it was just the Vermonter in her, but certain gritty parts of L.A. felt as if they might break into violence at any provocation. Another factor of the heat, Sasha claimed, combined with Eleanor’s subconsciously racist imagination. Which was probably true. Sasha was the first black person she’d known intimately. Vermont hardly went out of its way to make people of color feel comfortable, Sasha noted whenever she visited Eleanor at home in Newport, where residents sometimes did double-takes before looking away guiltily.

As Eleanor ran along the canyon edge, she passed a lone scraggly California tree with a bench placed strategically beneath it. She closed her eyes, but that didn’t stop the memories from forming against her eyelids. Running with your eyes closed near a two-hundred-foot drop was not advisable, so she opened her eyes and let the images come. Fighting them didn’t help, she’d learned by now.

One March several years earlier, her mother had traveled west with her to visit Sasha over spring break. Sarah Chapin had never been to Southern California, and it was something she had always wanted to do. Before she died was the phrase that, at the time, had recently begun to hang over them all. She’d successfully fought the first round of breast cancer, which had found its way into her lymph nodes before they caught it. For four years she was cancer-free. But then, before the all-important five-year anniversary, the cancer came back. The second time, she’d opted to have a double mastectomy and breast reconstruction surgery.

To celebrate the supposedly successful completion of the second round of treatment, Eleanor had (with her dad’s help) surprised her mom with a one-week vacation to L.A. They’d stayed in Sasha’s guest room, where Eleanor had awakened more than once in the night to find her mother weeping beside her in the queen bed.

But by day, Sarah Chapin rallied. The trio walked the bustling streets near Sasha’s apartment each morning, visited museums and art galleries in the afternoons, even drove the four-and-a-half hours to Vegas and back for an overnight gambling adventure. Their last day in L.A., Sasha and Eleanor brought her mother to Runyon Canyon. She wanted to make it up on her own power, but by the time they neared the top, Sarah was fading fast. She sat down on the bench beneath the lone shade tree at the edge of the trail and didn’t move. After twenty minutes, Sasha pulled Eleanor aside and offered to call for paramedics. They could come in the back way from Mulholland Drive, where there was an entrance to the rim of the canyon.

But Eleanor didn’t want to embarrass her mother, so instead, Sasha jogged down to the parking lot and drove up Mulholland to meet them. Eleanor helped her mother to the car, feeling the fragility of her bones, the dryness of her skin. Her treatment had concluded six months earlier, but she was still so weak. That was when Eleanor began to believe her mother wouldn’t make it. The cancer was waging too fierce a battle. Sarah Chapin was losing her ability to fight back.

After the Runyon Incident, as Eleanor thought of it, she and her mom stayed an extra two days “to regroup,” and it turned out that the trip extension allowed them to check out a new planetarium show at the Griffith Park Observatory, one that explored the history of the universe and humanity’s place in it. The show was the highlight of the trip, her mom told her on the plane home. As director of the local public library, Sarah had spearheaded a long-term capital campaign to add a planetarium to the Newport Public Library. A couple of months before she died, ground was broken on the start of the new Sarah Chapin Observatory just outside town on a hillside overlooking South Bay. Eleanor, her parents, and her sister were all there on a warm September afternoon to bear witness.

When she reached the canyon rim, Eleanor paused at a viewpoint, gazing out over the sunny, shiny city. She missed her mom so much, but she missed the younger, pre-cancer Sarah most. The disease that had killed her whittled her away slowly but steadily over its intermittent twelve-year assault, until Eleanor and her sister no longer recognized the same woman who had taught them to read before they started school, taken them hiking along the Appalachian Trail, laughed more than she cried. Losing her mother wasn’t like something out of an after-school special. The illness didn’t magically bring them closer or give them a common foe to fight. Eleanor, her sister and her dad were powerless to stop the spread of the disease that left her mother a trembling victim who, by the end, had seemed relieved to die.

Eleanor stared westward to the Santa Monica Mountains that edged West Hollywood. She didn’t want to think about her mother. That wasn’t why she’d come to Runyon. She wanted to think about something happier. Someone—but she knew who. Tessa Flanagan’s house wasn’t far from Runyon Canyon. Eleanor knew this because she’d copied down Laya’s home address before leaving work on Friday and typed it into Google Maps the night before after a lame tween movie premiere that Sasha had dragged her to. Only in L.A. did lawyerly work functions involve spotlights and the red carpet. Eleanor had found herself checking out the crowd throughout the evening, just in case.

“Your girlfriend isn’t here,” Sasha had said when she caught her scoping the crowd. “This isn’t her scene. Now, a black-tie dinner to raise money for AIDS treatment in Africa…”

“I can’t hear you,” Eleanor had maturely responded, humming to drown out the sound of her roommate’s teasing.

According to Google Maps, Tessa’s house was somewhere there, Eleanor thought now, gazing out at the hills rolling away to the west. Not that she’d ever find it from here, not even with binoculars. Too many hills in the way, and besides, the street view had only revealed a tall white stucco wall topped by an iron gate with security cameras posted at regular intervals. The Flanagans certainly took their security seriously. Not that she could blame them—Tessa no doubt had her share of scary stalkers.

Of which Eleanor was determined not to become another. She began to run down the western trail, taking the stairs built into the sand beneath the viewpoint as slowly as she could manage. One thing about being in your thirties, she’d noticed, it hurt more to fall. And the pain lasted longer. Another reason not to take up pole dancing—she wasn’t a highly coordinated athlete, though she could play softball with the best of them. Pole dancing was probably something better left to professionals. The slot machines in Vegas, on the other hand, she thought, remembering her mother’s laughter as they’d walked the Strip at night, could be a boon to amateurs and professionals alike. Maybe a quick trip to Sin City would be the answer to her grad school financing woes, since she hadn’t been graced with her sister’s athletic endowments.

Julia had attended UVM on a partial soccer scholarship. Daddy’s girl from the beginning, Julia grew up playing club soccer ten months a year and traveling to tournaments throughout Vermont and New England. Their father had been a faithful fan at all of her games, driving her to matches through rain and snow, over hill and dale. Eleanor was proud of her little sister, and had cheered her on every chance she got. But sometimes she’d wondered why the family always divided into “Eleanor & Mom” and “Julia & Dad.”

Before she came out her sophomore year at Smith, Eleanor had been much closer to her mother. When she decided to be honest with her parents about who she was, though, her mother withdrew. Someone outside the family might not have noticed, but Eleanor did. Her mom no longer looked her directly in the eye, no longer asked about her life. Eleanor had believed that time would help Sarah Chapin become more accepting. She’d hoped right up until the final hours of her mother’s life that she would take it all back and look at her with the same love and acceptance that had once graced their relationship. Now she never could.

That was the worst part—that her mother’s story, their family’s story, was over. It couldn’t change, couldn’t evolve over time. There was a finite beginning, middle and end. And the end had been hard. So much agony in such a small body. Her mother had finally simply faded away, color leaching out of her eyes, her skin, even her lips at the end, until she no longer resembled the woman Eleanor had loved and admired. Her mother’s story was set immutably in the text inscribed on the headstone in St. Mary’s Cemetery: Sarah Westfall Chapin—Beloved Mother, Daughter, Sister, Wife. We will miss you always. Simple but true. They would always miss her.

Although some more than others, perhaps. Six weeks after the funeral, Eleanor and her sister had been crossing Arkansas at dusk, the day’s light only a fading reminder at the horizon, when Julia informed her that their father had a girlfriend.

Eleanor’s gaze had jerked away from the road. “What? What are you talking about?”

“Dad is seeing someone. It’s pretty serious.”

“But it’s only been—I don’t understand. Who is she?”

“Emma Barnes. Her husband was killed in a plane crash a while ago. Dad remodeled her house a few years back. She’s great. You’d like her, Elle.”

“How do you know all of this?”

“Dad told me. I met Emma at Christmas.”

“Why didn’t you tell me then? Why didn’t Dad?”

“He thought you might need time to get used to the idea. You live so far away, and you don’t come home that often. He thought you might not understand the way things were with him and Mom at the end.”

“Boston is not that far away. And anyway, I took the year off from teaching so I could be home for Mom, so we could all be together.”

“Yeah, well, she didn’t just start dying in September.”

Eleanor’s gaze skittered back to Julia again, but her sister’s head was turned away. She was tempted to let the matter drop, to turn up the radio and let the impersonal noise drown out the personal pain flitting about the car, but the therapist she’d been working with had helped her break away from the family mythology (a regional hazard) that talking about bad things only made them worse. She forced herself to ask the question whose answer she was pretty sure she didn’t want to know. “You said he worked on her house a few years ago. How long have they been…?”

“I’m not sure,” Julia said, staring ahead at the darkening road before them. “A while, though, I think. They’re past the honeymoon stage—but maybe widows and widowers don’t get another honeymoon.”

Was this why their father had listed “Wife” last on the headstone? Because Sarah Chapin had been more beloved by the other people in her life? And had his wife known about his diverted affections?

Now as she neared the bottom of Runyon Canyon, Eleanor slowed to a walk and gulped more water. Sweat soaked every inch of her skin. Even her ponytail was wet. Back at the trailhead, she stretched out and tried to drip-dry a bit before climbing on Sasha’s bike and heading back to the apartment. Maybe she’d call Julia when she got home. They hadn’t spoken in a couple of weeks. Her baby sister would blow a gasket when she heard about her date with Tessa Flanagan, as Eleanor was now unofficially deeming their lunch together in the Barclay School cafeteria. It was only a small distortion, really, and anyway, what Tessa didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

On Sunday mornings, Tessa, Dani and Laya made a big breakfast in the carriage house where Dani and Ama lived. A devoted Catholic, Ama went to early mass on Sundays and usually came home just in time for the four of them to eat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen.

At first, this Sunday seemed no different from a hundred others. Tessa helped Laya cut her blueberry pancakes into manageable bites and poured orange juice into a tall plastic cup. Then she dug into her own pancakes, which were scrumptious as ever. Dani had embraced her suggestion after Laya was born that they eat as much organic, low-fat, gluten-free foods as possible. Her naturopath had recommended a vegan diet, but Tessa liked cheese and eggs too much to give up dairy. As a compromise, they ate fish and poultry but steered clear of mammals. Dani and Ama, who had grown up on a small island in the Philippines and come to the U.S. as adults, told her they’d eaten this way most of their lives.

“Until we moved to L.A.,” Ama would say. “Then we started to buy Spam and Frosted Flakes. ‘No pancit,’ our children would cry. ‘No Filipino food! Hamburgers and french fries, please!’”

“I like pancit,” Laya always said. “I like french fries too. But I don’t like hamburgers. I wouldn’t want to eat Moo.”

Moo, a big soft black and white dairy cow with expressive brown eyes, was one of her favorite stuffed animals.

This morning Laya was describing the craft project they’d worked on at school the previous week. “Miss Chapin brought in these flower stems made out of cardboard and this soft stuff, I forget what it’s called—wait. Feld?” She looked at Tessa for confirmation.

“Could it be felt?”

“Doh!” Laya slapped her forehead like Bart Simpson’s father, and Tessa wondered where she’d learned the move, since they didn’t watch The Simpsons at home. “That’s what I meant. Anyway, so Miss Chapin brought in the felt and we cut it up and made flowers and then she hung them up in the hall. Mine was super-duper pretty, Miss Chapin said so.”

Had Laya’s teacher used the word “super-duper,” or was it merely a product of Laya’s imperfect retelling? Tessa could picture Eleanor Chapin kneeling beside her students, helping them with the craft activity. Could see her smile, her freckles, her graceful hands. That generous mouth…

But Laya was asking her something, and she returned from her fantasies guiltily. “Sorry, honey, what?”

“I said, when are you coming back to school with me? Miss Chapin told me to tell you to come anytime.”

“She did, did she?” Tessa felt herself flush, and avoided Ama’s curious look. “I don’t know, Laya. I’m pretty busy with the foundation.”

“To help kids who aren’t as lucky as me,” Laya said, sighing. “I know. I just like it when you go with me. Miss Chapin likes it too.”

Now Ama was staring at her, eyebrows nearly level with her hairline, eyes twinkling. “Does she?” the tiny Filipina asked, balancing on her stool.

Busted, Tessa thought.

Dani looked from his wife to Tessa and back again. Then he put his fork down and went over to the stove to start cleaning up the breakfast mess, humming to himself. Tessa gave Ama a silencing look and said, “Come back, Dani. You know cleaning up is Laya’s and my job.”

“You keep eating,” he said. “You and that child both need fattening up.”

Laya giggled. “Miss Chapin says it’s not nice to call people fat.”

“In this case, it’s a compliment,” Tessa told her daughter.

After breakfast, she managed to avoid being alone with Ama for a little while. But eventually Dani drifted outside to work in the garden and Laya went down for her afternoon nap. Tessa was reclining among the pillows in the window seat downstairs, the Sarah Waters novel open on her lap, when the pint-sized inquisitioner finally cornered her.

“What’s this about Laya’s teacher?” Ama asked, settling onto the love seat with the blanket she was knitting for her youngest daughter’s new baby.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Tessa said, and stared down at the book she was determined to finish. Disliking a work of fiction simply because it was about straight people struck her as narrow-minded, a quality she would like to believe she didn’t possess. Anyway, plenty of straight people enjoyed Waters’ lesbian books, didn’t they? At least, straight people in England.

“That’s a load of hooey,” Ama said, repeating a Midwestern phrase Tessa had made the mistake of teaching her. “You like her, don’t you?”

Nancy, Ama’s eldest, had come out as a lesbian while at Stanford twenty years earlier. It had taken Ama some time, she’d told Tessa, but eventually she’d learned to embrace her daughter’s “lifestyle.” By the time she came to work for Tessa, she was fine with both the idea and practice of homosexuality. Dani wasn’t quite as far along as his wife, but Tessa only knew this because Ama had told her. Outwardly, he seemed unaffected by any mention of same-sex love.

One thing Ama didn’t like, though, was single motherhood. She was always after Tessa to find a nice girl and settle down. She and Dani wouldn’t be around forever to help out with Laya, and then what would happen? She’d once offered to set Tessa up with one of her daughter’s friends, at which point Tessa had had to remind her that unlike Nancy, she needed to stay closeted for professional reasons.

Another thing Ama didn’t approve of: “Too many people have worked too hard for you to hide,” she often said. “Like that Harvey Milk.”

Now Tessa frowned at her across the coffee table. “I do not like Miss Chapin. I mean, I like her, but I don’t like her.”

Ama laughed and muttered something in Tagalog.

Tessa’s mother and her Filipina friends in Chicago had spoken Tagalog, and she’d been able to understand it as a child. But now she only remembered a few phrases, among them magandang umaga (good morning), salamat (thank you), and malaya (free). This last word was Laya’s full name, of which Ama thoroughly approved.

“She’s Laya’s teacher,” Tessa pointed out. “It would be inappropriate.”

“Not for much longer,” Ama said.

Barclay followed the college calendar rather than that of the local public schools. In a matter of weeks, Laya would be on summer break.

“That reminds me,” Tessa said, changing the subject. “I was thinking of taking Laya to Kauai in June for a vacation. We could use some time away from the city. Would you and Dani like to come with us?”

Like many Filipinos, Ama and Dani both had family in Hawaii. They usually came along to the big house, as they jokingly called it, for a paid vacation in return for helping to look after Laya. Tessa had a home office at her vacation house, and while she tried to leave work behind for the few weeks they were in Hawaii, sometimes she needed to lock herself in for an afternoon.

“Not this time,” Ama said.

Tessa started. She’d thought asking was just a formality. “Really? Why not?”

“Dani wants to go back to the Philippines.”

“Oh. That’ll be nice.” Ama and Dani had visited family in the Philippines twice since coming to work for her. Each time they’d gone for three weeks, their suitcases overflowing with American T-shirts, shoes and candy bars to distribute among their relatives. Someday, Tessa wanted to go with them. She still had family there. She just didn’t know where. Or, precisely, whom. “How long will you be staying this time?”

Ama set her knitting needles aside. “I’ve been wanting to speak with you about this. Dani and I have been talking, and we agree. When we go to the Philippines this summer, we won’t be coming back right away.”

Tessa sat up, book forgotten. “But your children are here. And your grandchildren.”

“They are, but you know that our parents are still in the Philippines, and they’re very old, Tess. Dani’s father has some heart problems lately. He needs us. Later, we can come back here. But we are tired of L.A. It’s too expensive, and we would like to live near the sea again without having to listen to the smog reports.”

“Of course. That makes sense,” Tessa said, trying to wrap her mind around what Ama was telling her. “When were you thinking of going?”

“When you leave for Hawaii, we’ll go, too.”

Tessa felt her throat closing up. She looked down at her hands. They were going? And so soon? “Does this mean we won’t see you again?”

“Sweet girl,” Ama said, and came to sit beside her on the window seat. She took Tessa’s hand and held it between both of her own. “We will always see you again. You are our daughter now, and Laya is our granddaughter. You and she do not have family, so we adopt you. We choose you.”

Tessa had thought she’d worked through her abandonment issues (years of therapy before Laya’s birth with an eminently discreet psychologist who catered to Hollywood stars), but Ama’s words broke something inside her. Soon she was crying silently, her head on Ama’s shoulder as whispered Tagalog rose into the space above them. She was going to miss them so much, this funny little couple who had shared their home for Laya’s entire life. Despite what Ama said, once they left the country, would she and Laya ever see them again? She’d always thought of Ama and Dani as older because they had a daughter her age. But they came from an island where the average life expectancy exceeded ninety, they had told her proudly more than once. You just had to steer clear of the guerrilla fighters in the hills.

Eventually Ama kissed her forehead and returned to her knitting, and Tessa went back to her book, though she had a hard time concentrating on the words staining the pages, and not because the characters were straight. Now her mind churned from one worry to another—how would Laya take the loss of her adopted grandparents? Who would take over the thousand practical details Ama and Dani oversaw? And what would Tessa do with Laya when they got back from Hawaii? The foundation planning was ramping up, which meant she would need someone to watch Laya most days until school started again in the fall.

Ama had apparently been thinking on this matter too. When they heard Laya stirring in her upstairs bedroom a little later, she paused her knitting needles again and said, “You know, Mahal, I can think of a substitute kindergarten teacher who may be interested in employment.”

Tessa shook her head. “Stop matchmaking, Tita.”

“But I’m so good at it! My sister in Encinitas would not be happily married to this day if not for my assistance.”

And she was off and running on a story Tessa had heard many times before, always a little different, but always with the all-important ingredients of doughnuts, mini-golf and true love.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 617