Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“Nothing feels real,” I said, lying my head back against the headrest.

“Nothing is,” she said. “That’s our secret. You’re going to do just fine out here.”

She pushed a tape into the deck and the pure, somehow lonely voices of the Fifth Dimension spun out into the car: “When the moon is in the seventh house/And Jupiter aligns with Mars/Then peace will guide the planets/and love will steer the stars./This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius…”

She turned her head to me and smiled.

“This was one of the first albums you ever bought me, remember? When you were in college and I was feeling kind of down? It’s always seemed the most comforting song to me; it promises so much…”

I remembered. She had played the record over and over, shut away in her room, until it had become inoperable, and I had had to buy her another.

“Do you need comforting, Pie?” I said, like her reverting to an old nickname.

“Who doesn’t? But no, not really. I just like the song, that’s all.”

Her tone said the discussion was over, and we fell silent once more. She turned onto the Santa Monica Freeway, and I watched as names I had heard all my life sailed by on off-ramp signs: Century City, Twentieth Century Fox Studios, La Brea, Venice. I acknowledged them in my mind, but felt no curiosity about them as I usually did such signs in other new places. Here in this hurtling gray-greenness, everything was strange and consequently nothing was.

She made another turn and said, “I think we’ll try the San Bernardino Freeway. It’s a little longer, but you’ll have a better shot at the mountains this way. Sometimes this stuff lifts outside L.A. proper.”

“What mountains? Will we pass the Hollywood sign?”

“No, that’s back there behind us, in the Hollywood Hills. I’ve seen it about twice. We’ll see the San Gabriels and later the San Bernardinos. I hope. Right near Palm Springs the mountains come right down to the road; they’re really something. It’s beautiful country. I hate it when I have to leave.”

I put my head back and closed my eyes. Pom’s face swam into the space behind them, furious and anguished. I felt a stab of pity and love, and then, once more, the cold, constricting anger that had set me on this journey. Only this morning, it was. It felt like days, weeks. Pom’s face faded. I must have slept.

When I opened my eyes again the seemingly endless string of flat, sun-blasted little towns and strip shopping centers had given way to long stretches of pastel desert broken by strange, spiny, sentinel cacti and scrubby copses of small, silvery gray, wind-ruffled trees. The metallic sky had turned deep blue, and to our left a tidal wave of sharp, deep-shadowed mountains rose. They were so clearly defined that I could see small folds and crevices, carved cliffs and rock faces, the lighter scars of tracks and roads. They were stained the colors of earth and air: rose, brick, taupe, dust-gray, slate, deepwater blue. Beautiful; they were as alien and beautiful to me as the face of the moon.

“Are those the San Gabriels?” I said. “Where are we?”

“No. The San Bernardinos. We’re just past Ontario, coming up on Redlands. Home before long,” said Laura. She stretched both arms straight out and rotated her head on her neck.

“I’ll bet you could use a drink and something to eat,” she said. “I left Glynn making miso soup. She only said yuck six times.”

“How can she be making miso soup? I don’t even know what it is, much less Glynn. You may be sorry.”

“Nah. It’ll be good for you and her, too. Full of vitamins,” Laura said. “Listen, Met, it may be none of my business, but she worries me. She’s a neat kid…Lord, what a beauty; I had no idea…but she’s not really a kid. She doesn’t giggle, she doesn’t squeal, she doesn’t preen and look at herself in mirrors, she doesn’t even have any hot rollers or makeup with her. What’s going on with her? What’s wrong at your house?”

“There’s nothing going on with her,” I said stiffly. “She’s never giggled and squealed and all that silly teenage stuff; I think we’re going to be spared that. She is a good kid; the best. She writes and paints, and she’s good at music and great at science, and her grades are tops, and she’s a terrific swimmer; she wins meets…and there’s nothing wrong at our house. Thank you for asking, though.”

“Don’t mention it,” she said dryly. “Nothing the matter, huh? That’s why she runs away from home and you come tearing out here right behind her? There damned well is something wrong, and if you don’t know it, she’s in even worse trouble than I think she is.”

“Look, it’s just this stuff with Mommee,” I snapped. “That’s going to be settled when we get home, believe me. It’s not easy to be sixteen in a house with an addled old lady—”

“It’s more than that,” Laura said. “No, I will not shut up, so spare me that familiar scowl. She may be your daughter, but she’s my niece, and she came to me for help. Have you looked at her lately, really? God, Met, she’s so serious, and pale, and so damned thin ! And she seems apprehensive, even scared, all the time; she whispers like she’s listening for something. What does she do for fun, clean out her closets? Or no, I remember, there’s nothing now to clean out, is there? She told me about her new clothes. Christ. Why do you put up with that old harpy? No wonder Glynn ran away. I bet Pom’s sainted boys split long ago, didn’t they?”

“The boys are twenty-two and twenty-five,” I said. Anger thickened my voice. She had always known just which buttons to push. “Chip is working in New York for a brokerage house, and Jeff is in med school at Hopkins. They’re gone because it was time for them to go out into the world; nothing drove them away. Mommee wasn’t even with us when they left. She was with Pom’s brother and his wife then.”

“What did they do, leave her on a hospital doorstep and skip the country? So now you have her. And I mean you, because I bet Pom doesn’t spend more than five minutes a day with her. Brings old Mommee home and leaves you with the whole thing, you and Glynn.”

“It was my choice, Laura,” I said evenly, determined not to fall back into the old pattern of attack and defend, thrust and parry. I could not stop myself from adding, “Everybody can’t run away.”

My voice sounded smug even to me. But she only shrugged.

“Why not? Where is it written? So you’re going to cart my niece home tomorrow, huh?”

“That’s right.”

She gave me a long, oblique look from the sherry eyes.

“Let her stay,” she said. “Let me show her some of my world. I know a zillion people in the industry; we could see studios, and screenings, and go to lunch at famous places, and I could introduce her to some really famous people. It’s fantasy land, maybe, but it’s mine, and what kid wouldn’t love it? She might even turn into a real kid.”

“Even if I wanted to, Laura, I can’t,” I said. “Pom is really angry at both of us. He’ll get over it, but if I push him much right now he’s going to ground her for the rest of her life. I don’t want him to really punish her.”

“Bullshit,” Laura said. “It’s you he’ll punish. Listen, has she ever had a boyfriend? Has she gotten her period yet?”

“She’s a late bloomer. I was. Lots of her friends are.”

She was silent for a long while, and then she said, “Anorexia can kill you, Met.”

“Do you really think we haven’t been treating her…eating disorder?” I cried. “She’s been to doctors and in therapy since she was fourteen. It’s much better.”

“Couldn’t be much worse,” Laura said. “Why not try something different? Aunt Laura’s Sure Cure. I advise a long motor trip in sunny California, with the top down and good food and new clothes and exotic locations and glamorous people—”