The magazines at Gibson’s Variety were kept at the back of the store. Mr. Gibson was partially lame, so he always sat on a stool behind the counter near the cash register. He had a little black and white television hooked up beside him and was always watching something. Cathy taught herself how to steal the movie magazines, picking up two at a time, sliding the bottom one under the cover of a school binder while pretending to open the top one and browse through it. After a few minutes, she replaced the remaining magazine on the rack and then went right up to the front counter and bought gum or a chocolate bar with her fifty-cent allowance. She couldn’t look Mr. Gibson in the eyes. She felt bad about what she was doing to him. He was a nice man. He never seemed to mind the hordes of kids that descended upon the store after school. Sometimes, when he ran short of pennies, he’d push your nickel back across the counter to you when you still owed him two cents. Cathy had promised herself that if she ever got caught she would bring all the magazines back. They were in perfect condition. And then she would try to explain to him that this wasn’t really stealing. It was just something she needed to do. She had to bring Angela home to be near her.
By day, she kept the magazines hidden between her mattress and the box spring. At night, she waited until the house was quiet and then she brought them out and spoke to the pictures in the dark. If it was too dangerous even for that, she just positioned her cheek against the mattress, right above the spot where she could imagine touching Angela’s cheek on the cool paper below, and whispered through the thickness.
From the magazines, she had learned all sorts of things about Angela’s private life. She lived in a beach house in Malibu, California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and also had an apartment in New York. Cathy had one picture of Angela and Andy sitting at a round kitchen table beside sliding glass doors that led out to the beach. There is a bowl of green grapes on the table, and the wall behind them is panelled in diagonal wood strips. Andy, who has inherited her mother’s long legs and green eyes that disappear into little nests of eyelashes when she laughs, is barefoot and has pulled her knees up to her chest. Grinning, she looks straight out of the page at Cathy.
In another picture, Angela is sitting in a hotel room in Paris where she is on location for a movie. The location is a boon to her because, that particular year, Andy is attending a boarding school just outside of Paris. In the picture, Angela is dressed entirely in black and is drinking iced tea out of a tall slender glass. The interview is about motherhood. Cathy had read it so many times that large parts of it were committed to memory.
What’s being a good mother? Spending every waking hour at your kid’s elbow? I gave Andy some space so she could learn to make her own decisions. Compared to other American children her age, she’s a model of sophistication. She’s been all over the world; since she’s been five years old, she’s been flying between her father and me by herself. She knows how to find her way back to Spain from Hollywood and I don’t have to worry about her; I can just put her on the plane; she knows how to ask the stewardesses for directions to the washroom in three different languages and she knows her father will meet her at the other end.
What I gave her was the space and the opportunity to learn things. Most kids have the opportunity to think for themselves thwarted because their mother is always there to do everything for them. If I’d kept Andy at school strictly in America or in Spain, she would speak Spanish or English, but not both, and know her way from her house to the school and that’s all. But life is what you make of opportunity and I wanted her to learn that early.
At this point the type ran onto the next page of the magazine. Before turning the page, Cathy always upended the picture to read the time on Angela’s watch. It always said the same thing—8:50. The detail was important to Cathy. If she met Angela someday, she could tell her that she knew exactly what time the picture had been taken. Angela might say that she was a bright, observant girl.
Why do I constantly have to explain my marriage to people? They are so bogged down they are incapable of accepting anything unusual. They see only the age difference between Eduard and me and the fact that we live apart much of the year, and based on that, they draw conclusions. What they don’t see is that there is room for variation on a theme. A good marriage and quality parenting don’t have to take place in suburban America behind a white picket fence with people crammed under one roof so closely that they trip over each other.
Who are strangers to decide that Andy is deprived and my marriage must be a failure?
Do you expect me to believe that there is a quality to life worth having that is found five nights a week on a Los Angeles freeway during rush hour or at the laundromat on weekends?
Do you know that a woman came up to me at a restaurant in New York once and told me that I should find a young lover so that my daughter could have a real father? She was sure Eduard would understand this. Can you imagine? She obviously thought that Andy was missing something. But with us, Andy has the best of both worlds. She sees things from my generation’s perspective and she sees things through her father’s eyes. Since she’s been a baby, when she’s living in Spain, the two of them go out walking in the evenings. They’ve enjoyed hundreds of hours of each other’s companionship in this way. She’s learned to speak perfect Spanish, and her father has read stories to her and told her about things that she never would have encountered had she grown up only in America.
I can’t agree that Andy would be richer for having grown up in California sitting on the couch watching television with a younger father.
Besides talking to the magazine pictures, Cathy often found herself travelling to the kitchen in Malibu to visit. Andy pulled an extra chair out from beneath the table with her agile feet and motioned for Cathy to sit down; Angela nosed the bowl of grapes towards her.
“There you are. What took you so long? We were worried about you. Why don’t you just live here with us, instead? Here, have some grapes.”
“Yeah! Come to school with me. It’ll be way better. I can introduce you to some of my friends. You’ll have a much better time. Do you want something to drink?”
Sometimes they went for a stroll on the beach accompanied by Mickey, Andy’s black cocker spaniel. Sometimes while they walked, with the ocean breeze lifting up the edges of their hair and caressing their faces, Angela reached up and gently took a shock of Cathy’s hair in her hand and gave her head an affectionate shake.
It was on this beach in Malibu that Cathy spent the Sunday afternoon before beginning her new summer job. She stayed in her room all afternoon, sprawled across her bed, gazing quietly at her collection of magazine pictures. Angela danced around in the sand, making her laugh.
“Just think of the creative possibilities of cooking for three priests. Our father, who art at the table, hallowed be thy grain. Hail Mary, full of grapes, the Lord is whiskey. Blessed be the beans that come unto you. No, no, even better ... blessed be the beans that return unto you. In the name of the fork, the spoon, and the holy roast. Almonds.”
A barefoot Andy stood in ankle-deep water tossing a stick into the Pacific for Mickey. She looked back over her shoulder.
“It’s a good thing you act, Mom, instead of having a night-club routine. We’d starve.”
“Don’t interrupt. I’m on a roll. You can serve spaghetti with saintly sauce. Holy hamburgers, although holy humbuggers would work too. What else? Mother of God’s meatloaf.”
Angela, laughing, turned into the wind to clear her hair out of her face.
“Holy cow, this is too funny. Oops, there’s another one. What’s for dinner tonight, Cathy? Holy cow with massed potatoes and blessings, Father. Oh Christ, we are going to have a blast!”
CHAPTER 6
He’d been taught that in the end, there was no one left but God. But what if God had also turned away? Then what did a person have? Worse, what did a priest have? Nothing, of course. Absolutely nothing. Nothing to embrace, nothing