next door is also for sale. It is made of white clapboard and small enough to be home for a family of field mice. The chain-link fence that separates these two relics has been long smashed at the post, as if the neighbors had a problem backing a car out of the mouse-sized driveway.
It is curious all right. The age of the place alone makes it easy to picture Poppy as a handsome young man with blond hair and strong jaw striding out the front door in his blue policeman’s uniform, my mother on the strange little side porch coming off the kitchen shelling peas in some kind of a hairdo from World War II.… But that’s imagination, not memory.
My earliest real memory is of an event that took place fifty miles south. It was the first day of kindergarten at Peter H. Burnett Elementary School in Long Beach, 1965, when my mother said goodbye on the sidewalk and turned away, seemingly without emotion. Before that moment when she pushed me out into the world at the age of five there is only darkness and silence, but afterward I remember everything: the weak feeling in my legs as I crossed the schoolyard alone toward the sandy-colored building. The exotic art deco architecture that made it look like a castle carved from brown sugar. Inside I remember the spice of tempera paint and the fresh smell of new books and my first friend, Laura Levy, who wore two neat braids. We had sour-tasting milk in the afternoon.
Poppy, my mother, and I lived on Pine Street in an upper-middle-class neighborhood called Wrigley. Most of the homes had been built in the thirties, Craftsman or bungalow style, but ours was redbrick and brand-new. The trolley tracks ran two blocks away and it was a big deal to take the Pacific Electric Red Car into downtown Los Angeles to go to Cinerama or the May Company, a fancy department store they didn’t have in Long Beach.
The Public Safety Building that housed the Long Beach Police Department, where Poppy eventually earned the rank of lieutenant, was then less than ten years old, and seemed very forward with its sea-blue glass and columns encrusted in mosaic tile. In Southern California in the sixties everything was on the upswing.
I could continue from there, a million tiny remembrances of a normal childhood in a sunny coastal town where farmers would come to retire from the brutal winters of the Midwest; a conservative, easygoing community before developers got ahold of downtown and surgically removed every last twitching tissue of life. My claim to fame at Long Beach Polytechnic High School was being elected captain of the girls’ swim team. My best subjects were science and math. The motto over the school entrance still reads, “Enter to Learn — Go Forth to Serve,” and I guess I still take it seriously.
All of that is clear; what I can’t figure out is this wizened little preconscious cottage in Santa Monica. I strain to place myself inside its tantalizing history. What kind of little girl was I? Where were my secret places? Did I climb the beech tree? Who lived in the house next door? Memory does not respond. I sit there with my hands on the steering wheel, feeling numb.
The next thing I know I am driving up a street with tall pines and deep shade. Clearly when we lived here we lived on the modest end of the neighborhood; as the street numbers get bigger, so do the homes. By Twentieth Street the landscaping is lush, the flowers sumptuous, screaming orange-red bougainvillea flopping over white stucco walls. On every block gardening or construction work is being done by Hispanic men. Lunch trucks selling Mexican food cruise the area along with private Westec security patrols. I am concentrating on these details to avoid a growing feeling of sadness. I know it is coming from having seen that house, which I now wish I had avoided. I note a uniformed maid walking a dog and try to conjure up some cynicism but the sadness is there. Maybe I am confusing myself with Violeta’s children, it must be Teresa I am picturing huddled in the skirts of a starched dress in the scrawny marigolds beside my grandfather’s house, not me. Teresa alone and crying, not me.
• • •
The Eberhardts live in a two-story contemporary Mediterranean, bald and newly built. It has a red tile roof and two huge curved casement windows looking into the first-floor living room that echo the archway over an outsized door. A quarry tile walkway bends through a scruffy brown lawn; a few plants edge up against the off- white walls — except for a grouping of vigorous young birch trees, the place looks dry and neglected as if after paying a million and a half dollars the owners didn’t have the stamina to deal with landscaping. I guess to most people a million-and-a-half-dollar box with a few doodads is plenty.
Of course on this scale of house there is no doorbell — instead, a security system, with a square white button to push and a speaker to talk into.
“Yes?”
“Hello, my name is Ana Grey. I’m looking for Claire Eberhardt.” Since this is not government business I do not identify myself as a federal agent.
“This is she.”
“I’m a … friend … of Violeta Alvarado,” still speaking into the microphone. “Could I talk to you?”
Pause. “Violeta … doesn’t work here.”
I stifle the urge to say, Of course not, she’s dead. I am getting tired of talking to the wall.
“I know that. This will just take a minute, ma’am.”
“All right. Hang on.”
Silence. She’s coming. Which gives me the opportunity to study the front door — four feet wide and twice as tall as normal with a crescent-shaped window over the top, dark wood, mahogany maybe with some sort of finish intentionally scratched up. Just as I am wondering why anybody would need such a huge door, it opens.
She is holding a boy about two years old who is resting his head against her bare neck.
“Peter just woke up from a nap,” she explains, pivoting so I can see Peter’s flushed cheek and glossy eyes. They both have shiny black hair, so dark it almost has shades of eggplant purple, the boy’s in long loose curls, hers sticking out in all directions from a pink elastic band pushed up off the forehead as if she just wanted to get her bangs out of the way.
“I’m Claire.” She is wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and baggy turquoise cotton tights meant to hide a few extra pounds. Her breasts are loose. Even with the crazy hair and padded hips she is attractive in a reckless sexual way; but her looks are a neglected afterthought, as if it is enough that she’s made it from wherever she came from, she lives north of Montana. Although she seems as if she’s been napping along with her son, she is wearing strawberry-red lipstick. My first impression of Claire Eberhardt is that she is as unfinished as her house.
You’d expect her to take up the doorway with ownership and conviction, but instead she is backed up inside, curved around the child, unsure. She seems to be looking at me but away at the same time.
“Sorry to barge in on you, but it’s about Violeta Alvarado.”
“What about her?”
“Did Ms. Alvarado work here?”
“Yes. Until about three months ago. We had to let her go.”
“Why was that?”
She cocks her head in a peculiar manner as if staring down at a corner of the doormat. “It just didn’t work out.”
“How long was Ms. Alvarado employed here before you let her go?”
“Almost a year. Why?”
She shifts the boy to her other shoulder and faces me directly. Now I see the reason for the strange bearing: the left eye turns out slightly, enough to give an off-centered look of which she seems to be extremely self- conscious.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
“Bad news?”
“Violeta Alvarado was killed.”
Suddenly the child seems too heavy for her. She turns and calls,
A tiny brown grandmother appears, right out of the Andes. She grins with gold teeth and reaches for the boy, who clings to his mother’s neck. They have to pry his hands apart. He starts to wail. The grandmother, still smiling, whispers soothing words I can’t under stand and bears him away, still crying fiercely, arms outstretched toward his mom.
Claire Eberhardt closes her eyes to her son’s distress and turns back to me, clearly shaken.
