Road to Paradise. Paullina Simons

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СКАЧАТЬ slightly blank about her eyes when they stared.

      “I gotta go. Look, even if I agree to do this,” I said, pressing my books to my chest like palms to my breasts, “you’re going to have to take a bus to Bakersfield. I can drop you off in San Francisco, but then you’re on your own.”

      “You want me to take a bus?” Gina said as if I were asking her to eat pig slops.

      I moved to go. She caught up with me. “Listen,” she said. “Please say yes. I won’t be able to go without you.” She lowered her voice. “I really need to get to Bakersfield as soon as poss. And Mom won’t let me go unless I go with you.”

      “Your mother won’t let you go? What are you, five?”

      “That’s what mothers do, Shelby,” said Gina, pompously. “They care what happens to you.”

      God! What she didn’t say was, you’d know that, Shelby, if you had a mother.

2

       Emma

      I was raised in a souped-up boarding house near Mamaroneck, New York, a four-star boarding house, which is akin to saying a sirloin burger. It’s still a burger. Actually, the house I lived in was in Larchmont, next town over, but I enjoy saying Mamaroneck, because it has the word Mama in it, and I don’t like telling people I come from Larchmont, as it carries with it a superior tag I don’t much care for. You have to have a French accent to pronounce it properly. Larsh-MOH. People who don’t know won’t understand, but people who know raise their eyebrows and say, “Oh, Larchmont. Wow.” It is for them I say I live near Mamaroneck. Nobody ever raises their eyebrows at that. It’s suburban-sounding, not French-sounding, unpretentious, not posh—all the things you can’t say about Larchmont, a cosmopolitan, sophisticated, old-world European city in the middle of parochial, provincial suburban America. The streets are winding and canopied, the houses Tudor, compact and esoteric, with square rooms, hardwood floors and tiny kitchens, a town where the Christmas lights get strung up for December down Main Street and twinkle merrily in the snow. Many houses are for rent, and there is one particular furnished Tudor, off Bridge Street, on a cul-de-sac (even that’s French) where Emma and I live in three small rooms above the garage that stands on a driveway overhung by enormous trees that drip sap in the spring and fall, staining my running shoes. We live there for free, but the way washing machines and vacuum cleaners live for free. In exchange for our rooms, we maintain the house. Mostly Emma does this. I help out on the weekends.

      I live with Emma. Her last name is Blair. And mine is Sloane. These things I know.

      Now for all the things I don’t know. I don’t know who Emma is, why I live with her or who she is to me. When I was a child, I used to call her Aunt Emma, but then I grew up. Always, since then, she has been just Emma.

      I also know this. And I only found out because Gina’s friend, the ridiculous and bug-eyed Agnes Tuscadero, eavesdropped on her parents’ very private kitchen conversation late one night a few years ago. Apparently my father, Jed Sloane, while married to my mother, took up with a woman who they think was named Emma, who might or might not have been my mother’s sister/aunt/best friend. So the reason I don’t have a mother is because of Emma. My mother split, leaving me with Dad and his new mistress/lover/fling. Agnes’s parents gossiped and Agnes told Gina who told me that my mother left a letter saying, I know all you ever wanted was your smokes and your drinks and your whore. Well now you can have them. My life and everything in it was a complete waste of time. My mother wrote that, I presume, sometime before she left me.

      I don’t know where this letter is, and believe me, that’s not for the lack of looking. Every crevice of every drawer in our two rooms and a living room, I have scraped through, searching for it, wanting to see her handwriting, and her name. Haven’t found it—yet.

      Now, I don’t know what my mother looked like, but I know what Emma looks like, and I find it surprising, to put it euphemistically, that any man would leave home for a woman like Emma, who, with her thick ankles, square low-heeled shoes, gray stiff helmet of hair, and matronly dresses, couldn’t engender passion in a rutting stud dog, much less a male human being. She simply seems too Puritan for love of any kind.

      What’s interesting, in a purely academic way, of course, is that my father also left. I assume it was soon after my mother, because I don’t remember him. What’s odd is I do remember her, like a pale ghost with warm arms. He left and then died somewhere on the road. That’s all Emma told me, wanted to tell me; that’s all I asked, wanted to ask.

      Agnes told Gina who told me he did not leave a letter. Jed Sloane left, died, and left me with “the whore.”

      And she raised me.

      Who was my father?

      Who was my mother?

      And if Emma is no good, and my father left her, why am I still with her?

      More important, why is she still with me?

      Does she feel guilt over me? Do I ask this of her when we’re cleaning the bathrooms of the French U.N. diplomats?

      Emma, my father left; why did you stay?

      My mother left; why did you stay?

      Can you answer me as we wax the floors and cut up onions?

      If they all went away, walked away, why didn’t you walk away?

      I could not fathom what her answers might be.

      Eventually I began to feel that the time for questions had sort of passed; nonetheless, I felt that every day I had to tread carefully, to make sure I walked around the gullet where the fragments of answers had fallen.

      Question: irretrievably fallen?

      But I have this to add in conclusion. My friend from across the road, Debbie, had been spending a lot of time with us this year. She had two parents, a mother, a father, three brothers, a Beagle; her mother was home with the kids, her dad worked as a manager at the Larchmont hardware store. And yet Debbie, who had a whole family plus pet, was over with petless me and Emma; why? She helped us in the evening, watched TV, and though she lived across the street, would often ask if she could stay over. Emma always said yes. Just yes. No less, no more. Yes.

      A few months ago, Debbie finally told me that her father was sick. Our neighbor, Ralphie, was driving him every week to the hospital. Turned out his liver was shot. He needed a transplant in a hurry but couldn’t get one despite having a wife, four kids and no job: he was a drunk, and no one gave fresh liver to alcoholics. So he would drink, scream at his wife and kids, and be sick. When he was sober, Ralphie drove him to the hospital for kidney dialysis and tests. Debbie’s dad was a drunk for twenty years. Ralphie drove him to the hospital for his last two months. One day Debbie’s dad didn’t come home from the hospital, and Debbie’s mom took Debbie and the one brother who was still home and left, possibly for Florida. I missed them when they went. They had seemed like such a nice family.

      Emma СКАЧАТЬ