Judith Tarr: Household Gods

Six years and she could still marvel at the way the light came down straight and white and hard, with an edge to it that she could taste in the back of her throat. Good solid Los Angeles smog, pressed down hard by the sun: air you could cut pieces off and eat. She’d thought she’d never be able to breathe it, gone around with a stitch in her side and a catch in her lungs, till one day she woke up and realized she hadn’t felt like that in weeks. She’d whooped, which woke up Frank; then she’d had to explain: “I’m an Angeleno now! I can breathe the smog.”

Frank hadn’t understood. He’d just eyed her warily and grunted and gone to take over the bathroom the way he did every morning.

She should have seen the end then, but it had taken another couple of years and numerous further signs — then he was gone and she was a statistic. Divorced wife, mother of two.

She came back to the here-and-now just past White Oak, just as everything on the south side of the street turned green. The long rolling stretch of parkland took her back all over again to the Midwest — to the place she’d taught herself to stop calling home. There, she’d taken green for granted. Here, in Southern California, green was a miracle and a gift. Eight months a year, any landscape that wasn’t irrigated stretched bare and bleak and brown. Rain seldom fell. Rivers were few and far between. This was desert — rather to the astonishment of most transplants, who’d expected sun and surf and palm trees, but never realized how dry the land was beyond the beaches.

There was actually a river here, the Los Angeles River, running through the park. But the L.A. River, even the brief stretch of it not encased in concrete, would hardly have passed for a creek in Indiana. She shut down a surge of homesickness so strong it caught her by surprise. “Damn,” she said softly — too soft, apparently, for the kids to hear: no voice piped up from the back, no “Damn what, Mommy?” from Justin and no prim “We don’t use bad words, Mommy,” from Kimberley. She’d thought she was long past yearning for Indiana. What was there to yearn for? Narrow minds and narrower mindsets, freezing cold in the winter and choking humidity in the summer, and thousands of miles to the nearest ocean.

And green. Green grass and bare naked water, and air that didn’t rake the lungs raw.

Just past Hayvenhurst, everything stopped. A red sea of brake lights lay ahead, and she had no way to part it. She glared at the car radio, which hadn’t said a word about any accidents. But the traffic reports seldom bothered with surface-street crashes; they had enough trouble keeping up with bad news on the freeways.

“Why aren’t we going, Mommy?” Kimberley asked from the backseat, as inevitable as the traffic jam.

“We’re stuck,” Nicole answered, as she’d answered a hundred times before. “There must be an accident up ahead.”

They were stuck tight, too. With the park on one side of Victory and a golf course on the other, there weren’t even any cross streets with which to escape. Nothing to do but fume, slide forward a couple of inches, hit the brakes, fume again.

People in the fast lane were making U-turns to go back to Hayvenhurst and around the catastrophe that had turned Victory into defeat. Nicole, of course, was trapped in the slow lane. Whenever she tried to get into the fast lane, somebody cut her off. Drivers leaned on their horns (which the Nicole who’d lived in Indianapolis would have been surprised to hear was rare in L.A.), flipped off their neighbors, shook fists. She wondered how many of them had a gun in waistband or pocket or purse or glove compartment. She didn’t want to find out.

Ten mortal minutes and half a mile later, she crawled past the U-Haul truck that had wrapped itself around a pole. The driver was talking to a cop. “Penal Section 502,” she snarled, that being the California section on driving under the influence.

She had to slow down again as cars got onto the San Diego Freeway, but that happened every day. She bore it in resigned annoyance as a proper Angeleno should, but with a thrum of desperation underneath. Late-late-late…

Once she got under the overpass, she made reasonably decent time. Thoughts about locking the barn door after the horse was stolen ran through her mind.

Parts of Van Nuys were ordinary middle-class suburb. Parts were the sort of neighborhood where you wished you could drive with the Club locked on the steering wheel. Josefina’s house was right on the edge between the one and the other.

“Hello, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” Josefina said in accented English as Nicole led her children into the relative coolness and dimness of the house. It smelled faintly of sour milk and babies, more distinctly of spices Nicole had learned to recognize: cilantro, cumin, chili powder. The children tugged at Nicole’s hands, trying to break free and bolt, first into Josefina’s welcoming arms, then to the playroom where they’d spend most of the day.

Normally, Nicole would have let them go, but Josefina had put herself in the way, and something in her expression made Nicole tighten her grip in spite of the children’s protests.

Josefina was somewhere near Nicole’s age, several inches shorter, a good deal wider, and addicted to lurid colors: today, an electric blue blouse over fluorescent orange pants. Her taste in clothes, fortunately, didn’t extend to the decor of her house; that was a more or less standard Sears amalgam of brown plaid and olive-green slipcovers, with a touch of faded blue and purple and orange in a big terracotta vase of paper flowers that stood by the door. Nicole would remember the flowers later, more clearly than Josefina’s face in the shadow of the foyer, or even the day-glo glare of her clothes.

Nicole waited for Josefina to move so that Kimberley and Justin could go in, but Josefina stood her ground, solid as a tiki god in a Hawaiian gift shop. “Listen, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” she said. “I got to tell you something. Something important.”

“What?” Nicole was going to snap again. Damn it, she was late. How in hell was she going to make it to the office on time if the kids’ daycare provider wanted to stop and chat?

Josefina could hardly have missed the chill in Nicole’s tone, but she didn’t back down. “Mrs. Gunther-Perrin, I’m very sorry, but after today I can’t take care of your kids no more. I can’t take care of nobody’s kids no more.”

She did look sorry. Nicole granted her that. Was there a glisten of tears in her eyes?

Nicole was too horrified to be reasonable, and too astonished to care whether Josefina was happy, sad, or indifferent. “What?” she said. “You what? You can’t do that!”

Josefina did not reply with the obvious, which was that she perfectly well could. “I got to go home to Mexico. My mother down in Ciudad Obregon, where I come from, she very sick.” Josefina brought the story out pat. And why not? She must have told it a dozen times already, to a dozen other shocked and appalled parents. “She call me last night,” she said, “and I get the airplane ticket. I leave tonight. I don’t know when I be back. I don’t know if I be back. I’m very sorry, but I can’t help it. You give me the check for this part of the month when you pick up the kids tonight, okay?”

Then, finally, she stood a little to the side so that Kimberley and Justin could run past her. They seemed not to know or understand what she’d said, which was a small — a very small — mercy. Nicole stood numbly as they vanished into the depths of the house, staring at Josefina’s round flat face above the screaming blue of her blouse. “But — ” Nicole said. “But — ”

Her brain was as sticky as the Honda’s engine. It needed a couple of tries before it would turn over. “But what am I supposed to do? I work for a living, Josefina — I have to. Where am I supposed to take the children tomorrow?”