JOAN PEELER said she had never come across a kid like me, she wanted to have me tested. I spent a couple of days filling out forms with a fat black pencil. Sheep is to horse as ostrich is to what. I'd been through this before, when we came back from Europe and they thought I was retarded. I wasn't tempted to draw pictures on the computer cards this time. Joan said the results were significant. I should be going to a special school, I should be challenged, I was beyond tenth grade, I should be in college already.
She started visiting me weekly, sometimes twice a week, taking me out for a good meal on the county. Fried chicken, pork chops. Half-pound hamburgers at restaurants where all the waiters were actors. They brought us extra onion rings and sides of cole slaw.
During these meals, Joan Peeler told me about herself. She was really a screenwriter, social work was just her day job. Screenwriter. I imagined my mother's sneer. Joan was writing a screenplay about her experiences as a caseworker for DCS. 'You wouldn't believe the things I've seen. It's incredible.' Her boyfriend, Marsh, was also a screenwriter; he worked for Kinko's Copies. They had a white dog named Casper. She wanted to win my trust so I would tell her things about my life to include in her screenplay. Research, she called it. She was hip, working for the county, she knew where it was at, I could tell her anything.
It was a game. She wanted me to strip myself bare, I lifted my long sleeve to the elbow, let her see a few of my dogbite scars. I hated her and needed her. Joan Peeler never ate a stick of margarine. She never begged for quarters in a liquor store parking lot to make a phone call. I felt like I was trading pieces of myself for hamburgers. Strips of my thigh to bait the hook. While we talked, I sketched naked Carnival dancers wearing elaborate masks.
16
JOAN PEELER found me a new placement. The girls pointedly ignored me as Joan helped me carry my stuff out to her red dented Karmann Ghia with bumper stickers that said, Love Your Mother, Move to the Light, Friends Don't Let Friends Vote Republican. Silvana sniffed that it was because I was white, I got special treatment. Maybe she was right. She probably was. It wasn't fair at all. It wasn't. But that March day, one of those perfect March days in L.A. when every photographer in town was out scrambling for shots of the city with a bluebird sky and white-capped mountains and hundred-mile views, I didn't care why. All I cared was that I was leaving.
There was snow on Baldy, and you could see every palm tree on Wilshire Boulevard five miles away. Joan Peeler played a Talking Heads tape for the drive.
'You'll like these people, Astrid,' she said as we drove west on Melrose, past body shops and pupuserias. 'Ron and Claire Richards. She's an actress and he does something with television.
'Do they have kids?' I asked. Hoping they didn't. No more babysitting, or 99-cent gifts when the two-year-old gets a ride-in Barbie car.
'No. In fact, they're looking to adopt.'
That was a new one, something I never considered. Adoption. The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box. I didn't know what to think. We passed Paramount Studios, the big triple-arched gate, parking kiosk, people riding around on fat-tired bicycles. The longing in her eyes. 'Next year, I'll be in there,' Joan said. Sometimes I didn't know who was younger, her or me.
I handled the word adoption in my mind like it was radioactive, saw my mother's face, pulpy and blind in sunken-cheeked fury.
Joan drove through the strip of funky Melrose shops west of La Brea, with shops of used boots and toys for grown-ups, turned south onto a quiet side street, into an old neighborhood of stucco bungalows and full-growth sycamores with chalky white trunks and leaves like hands. We parked in front of one, and I followed Joan to the door. An enamel plaque under the doorbell read The Richards in script. Joan rang the doorbell.
The woman who answered the door reminded me of Audrey Hepburn. Dark hair, long neck, wide radiant smile, about thirty. Her cheeks were flushed as she waved us in. 'I'm Claire. We've been waiting for you.' She had an old-fashioned kind of voice, velvety, her words completely enunciated, ing instead of in', the t crisp, precise.
Joan carried my suitcase. I had my mother's books and Uncle Ray's box, my Olivia things in a bag.
'Here, let me help you,' the woman said, taking the bag, setting it on the coffee table. 'Put that down anywhere.'
I put my things next to the table, looked around the low-ceilinged living room painted a pinkish white, its floor stripped to reddish pine planks. I liked it already. There was a painting over the fireplace, a jellyfish on a dark blue background, penetrated with fine bright lines. Art, something painted by hand. I couldn't believe it. Someone bought a piece of art. And a wall of books with worn spines, CDs, records, and tapes. The free-form couch along two walls looked comfortable, a blue, red, and purple woven design, reading lamp in the center. I was afraid to breathe. This couldn't be right, it couldn't be for me. She was going to change her mind.
'There are just a few things we need to go over,' Joan said, sitting down on the couch, opening her briefcase. 'Astrid, could you excuse us?'
'Make yourself at home,' Claire Richards said to me, smiling, reaching out in a gesture of gift. 'Please, look around.'
She sat down with Joan, who opened my file, but she kept smiling at me, too much, like she was worried what I'd think of her and her home. I wished I could tell her she had nothing to worry about.
I went into the kitchen. It was small, tiled red and white, with a pearly-topped table and chrome chairs. A real Leave It to Beaver kitchen, decorated with a salt and pepper shaker collection. Betty Boops and porcelain cows and sets of cacti. It was a kitchen to drink cocoa in, to play checkers. I was afraid of how much I wanted this.
I walked out into the small backyard, bright with wide flowerbeds and pots on a wooden deck, a weeping Chinese elm. There was a flying goose windmill, and red poinsettia grew against the house's white wall in the sun. Kitsch, I heard my mother's voice in my ear. But it wasn't, it was charming. Claire Richards was charming, with her wide love-me smile. Her bedroom, which backed up to the deck through open French doors, was charming. The quilt on the low pine double bed, the armoire, the hope chest, and the rag rug.
As I moved back into the hall, I could see them, heads together over the coffee table, looking at my file. 'She's had an incredibly hard time of it,' Joan Peeler was telling my new foster mother. 'She was shot at one foster home ...'
Claire Richards shook her head in disbelief, that anyone could be so awful as to shoot a child.
The bathroom would be my favorite room, I could tell that already. Tiled aqua and rose, the original
