T. Boyle - San Miguel

“But she’s so angry all the time. Angry at everybody. You especially. Why is that? It’s just not right, the way she won’t have you in the room anymore, won’t even come to the table if you’re there.” She looked away, out across the yard to where the woman next door was cutting flowers and arranging them in a vase the little girl beside her held out patiently, the moment crystallizing, butterflies, birds, the sun like syrup poured over everything and all the trees reaching in unison for the sky. “What happened?” she asked, turning back to her. “What did you ever do to her?”

Ida’s eyes. Her moon face. The pursing of her lips, dry lips, lips that clung together with a thin film of soft pink flesh. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I just don’t know.”

Then everything changed. They went back to San Francisco, as promised, though it was to rented rooms and not the apartment she’d grown up in because strangers lived there now, and if she walked past it she told herself it was only to get where she was going by the shortest possible route and she never allowed herself to look up at the second-floor windows where her mother had kept her geraniums and Sampan would bunch himself against the glass to bask in the sun so that you could see him there from all the way down the block. There were doctors for her mother, new medicines. The cook — Ida had stayed behind in Santa Barbara and there was no arguing with her mother about it — was an irascible old woman named Mrs. Offenbacher, who could have played one of the weird sisters in Macbeth, and without a wig or a touch of greasepaint either. The rooms were dreary, furnished by somebody else, withered plumes of pampas grass sprouting from a vase at the door, the furniture nicked and worn, a smell of dust and disuse in the air. It might have been depressing under other circumstances, but not to her, not after the island. She was in San Francisco, and nothing else mattered. Her friends were here, her true friends, girls she’d known all her life, not just acquaintances like Becky Thorpe and the other girls in Santa Barbara, and they hadn’t forgotten her — within days of her arrival she began to receive invitations to parties and dances, carriage rides in the park, picnics, outings at the beach. Better yet, there was money again and that meant she could go back to her ballet and voice lessons.

At the end of August, when it came time to return to Santa Barbara— For the air, her stepfather said, and school, school of course —she began to feel dejected all over again. She wanted her mother to recover, of course she did, with all her heart, but as far as she could see the air was no better down there than it was here — it was all California, wasn’t it? Why couldn’t they stay? Why couldn’t they wait till the lease was up on their old apartment and move back in and have a normal life instead of packing up and moving from one place to another like gypsies? She didn’t want to whine, didn’t want to be a complainer, but she did and she was.

She came up the stairs one afternoon after ballet class, trudging, dragging her feet, angry at the world, the hallway reeking of Mrs. Offenbacher’s sauerbraten and the odious woman in the flat next door crowding the staircase with her two brats in tow so that she had to put on a false smile for them though all she wanted to do was tear out her hair and scream like one of the damned in Dante’s river of fire, and was surprised to see her mother and stepfather sitting in the parlor at that hour. It was odd to see them together like that, especially in the afternoon. More and more, her mother was confined to bed, where she read or knitted or dozed off sporadically throughout the day and then let her lamp burn into the small hours of the night, and Edith’s stepfather was always out somewhere doing whatever he did when he wasn’t wrestling sheep on a muddy ranch in the middle of nowhere. Business, that’s what he called it — he had business — and left it at that.

Before she could even remove her coat, she could feel the tension in the room. Her stepfather sat rigid in the armchair by the window, his jaws clamped and his gaze fixed on the street below, and her mother — in a pretty plum-colored dress instead of her chintz wrapper — sat just as stiffly across from him. They’d been quarreling, that much was evident. “I’m back,” she said, slipping out of her coat and hanging it in the hall closet — it had been brisk out on the street, the fog creeping in over the rooftops to dissolve the sun and a chill breeze running in ahead of it, though she’d never admit it. San Francisco? Cold? Never.

Her mother coughed gently into one fist. “We’ve been talking, your father and I,” she said — and here she shot a look at Edith’s stepfather, who wouldn’t acknowledge her, wouldn’t even turn his head—“and we’ve agreed that you’ll be staying on here, in boarding school, for the academic year.”

It took a moment to register the words, and then suddenly it was as if the sun had broken through the fog and struck the room with light, meteoric, blinding. She was there on the edge of the carpet, feeling as if she were at the very beginning of a recital, every head turned to her and the conductor holding his baton at the ready. She didn’t know what to say.

“Miss Everton’s Young Ladies’ Seminary,” her mother went on, “where Rebecca Thompson’s daughters attend classes. Carrie Abbott speaks highly of it. And the curriculum should suit you perfectly: French, German, Music and Art.” Her mother was smiling her beautiful smile, full-lipped, her teeth shining and perfectly proportioned, and for just that moment she looked as she had before the disease claimed her, vibrant, young, sure of herself. “I’ve already spoken with Miss Everton. You’re to begin September fourteenth.”

Her stepfather had nothing to say to this. In the next moment he stood abruptly, strode to the closet for his hat and stalked out the door, slamming it behind him. It was the cost he objected to, she was sure of it, as if nothing mattered but dollars and dollars alone. She didn’t care. She was soaring—“Oh, Mother,” she said, “Mother.” And then, just for a moment, she came crashing down again — this would mean separation, a two-days’ journey between them, and she’d never before been separated from her mother in her life.

“Of course, we’ll wait till you’re settled before we leave for Santa Barbara, and we’ll see you for Christmas. And write. We’ll write every day.”

* * *

It was a kind of miracle. After all she’d been put through on the island and in Mrs. Sanders’ class, where she’d never really belonged — they were hayseeds, rubes, and Santa Barbara wasn’t a city at all — now, finally, she felt she’d come home. And felt she’d earned it too. If she’d never been on San Miguel, never seen a sheep or a pig or suffered the grinding boredom of those anemic days and bloodless nights with no one to talk to and nowhere to go, she couldn’t have appreciated Miss Everton’s school the way she did. To the other girls it might have been usual, more of the same, a ritual society had contrived to prepare them for the next stage of life, which was to marry and marry money, but Edith saw things differently — this was her opportunity, her escape from the ordinary, from ranches and dust and a dying mother and a stepfather who could think of nothing but himself. And though she was an outsider at first — most of the girls had matriculated together through the elementary grades and formed their coteries and alliances — she quickly found her place. By the end of the first term she was earning A’s and B’s across the board and she was easily the best ballerina — and singer too — in the freshman class. Her French — the language of dance — was still limited ( Chère Maman, J’espère que vous allez bien ) and her German was weaker yet, but she was improving through sheer repetition and Miss Everton herself singled out her performance as Portia in the school’s co-production of The Merchant of Venice with St. Basil’s Academy as the best of the year.