Louise Page 2

  During dinner she banters, scooting her chair so close, letting him look right down her white V-neck T-shirt to the little yellow bow on her bra, that he gives in and kisses her.

  Claude doesn’t call the next day. Or the next. After he graduates he’s moving to California and will meet tons of girls, models, probably. Because of his mother, Claude speaks French, which has helped him always have a girlfriend. In Santa Barbara he has a job waiting for him, writing for a local paper, and will soon be really doing something, not sitting around in this wheat-filled state with these farm kids.

  •

  All semester, Louise has been watching Claude. He tells funny stories that the staff pass all around the newsroom. “Did you hear Claude’s latest?” they ask, referring mostly to his ex-girlfriends, who are all beautiful, but troubled—one had shown up at his apartment in the middle of the night, crying and supposedly holding a pink teddy bear. The collars of Claude’s shirts are always popped up, his sleeves rolled, hands gesturing while he talks. He’s not the type to sulk in the kitchen at parties, hiding behind his hair while he nurses a bottle of Pabst the way Davy would. Davy’s neediness embarrassed Louise. Claude she’ll have to work for.

  •

  Claude runs into Louise at a party and finds himself leaving with her. Soon they are together for whole weekends, in her bedroom, watching TV and leafing through magazines. He loves spending time with Louise, how she looks at him, how quick she is to laugh, but he can’t stand her friends, how they order blue drinks at clubs and dance crudely, spilling on themselves, and is glad when he graduates. He likes the longing that distance creates. He likes sharing dreams via email, seeing their plans typed up on a computer screen. They joke about their future apartment, one with a shiny chrome kitchen and floor-to-ceiling windows where they will stir-fry things in woks and drink sparkling wine. At night the hills of Santa Barbara will glitter with lights from outdoor living rooms and yards called “grounds.” They will do yoga on a sunny balcony with cacti in pots, and drink water with fresh-squeezed lime. Louise will walk down the clean, white sidewalks with arms full of shopping bags.

  Louise arrives on New Year’s Eve, 2005, and for one month their lives are not so far from this. They drink Mexican beer and wear bathing suits indoors. They do drugs and wander through organic markets, spotting celebrities. They wear aviator sunglasses and fearlessly turn their faces toward the sky. Their apartment complex is called Summerville.

  This would be their life now. That is what they believed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When Janet’s daughter was in the fourth grade, she collapsed at a Civil War site in Alabama. They were coming back from a family vacation in the Gulf Shores, famous for the squeaky sand. They had stayed in a high-rise condominium and swum in salty water for a week, and were now crowded in the station wagon again, pushing up north to their home in Michigan. This was before the divorce. Janet and Warner both wore gold rings and took turns driving. The children—Louise, Tom, and the baby, Michael—were sunburnt, and sipping apple juice from small tin cans. Warner had wanted to take a break and see a battlefield, so they had stopped at sunset. The air outside was so hot it made them pink, their stomachs and scalps stung with sweat. Then, right there in the graveyard, nine-year-old Louise fell and balled up on the scratchy yellow grass. She said she saw double and had a headache so bad she couldn’t move. For a second, Janet thought Louise was psychic, feeling the pains of those killed beneath her. Then she saw that Louise’s left eye had turned toward her nose. She couldn’t walk straight; Warner had to guide her to the car. Janet followed, carrying the baby and holding Tom’s sticky hand. He was five, silent and staring. Janet could do nothing.

  At first the doctors had thought Louise had a brain tumor. Then they said no: It was a clot of blood pressing down on her brain stem, a genetic irregularity. Their prescription: complete bed rest to allow the blood to reabsorb into her brain. She had to miss the last three months of fourth grade, but her symptoms all went away. Her eye rolled back to the center and locked there. In gymnastics, she could walk across a balance beam. The blood was gone. She was allowed to go to summer camp with her friends, but the doctors had said she should abstain from “contact sports” just to be safe. She ran track. Not much was mentioned about it in the family again, except every so often, someone would say how strange it all had been.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  After four days in the critical care unit in LA, I’m back in Santa Barbara. Back in our apartment. I have to wear an eye patch. Claude calls me Captain Hook. I call him a jerk. He says he’s just trying to make things around here a little more lighthearted. My mother buys patches in pink, blue, and beige, but I never wear them. I wonder where she got these, in the costume aisle at some specialty drugstore?

  The eye patch helps me not see double. Without the eye patch, I cannot tell which of the two doorknobs is real. I hold a glass under the faucet, but it will not fill up. It’s like being very drunk, or like a baby, trying to walk.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Janet knows she has done something wrong. She should have worried about Louise more. She didn’t call Louise for a week after she moved to California—she had wanted Louise to feel like a grown-up. Maybe she fed Louise bad foods when she was a baby?

  Claude is thinking that this has happened because he has bad luck. He is always wrecking cars and losing things. He got picked on in grade school, and is short. He has a string of ex-girlfriends who hate him.

  •

  Janet leaves the apartment to buy a vacuum cleaner. The carpet has a lot of sand in it from the beach. The building is on a steep dirt hill overlooking four lanes of speeding cars, and then there is the water and sand. The apartment is designed like a motel, with the bedroom window looking directly onto a walkway and the parking lot. In place of a curtain, Claude and Louise have pinned a large piece of tie-dyed fabric over the bedroom window. More privacy is needed.

  Janet gets off the freeway at Wagon Wheel Circle. She goes fast, around and around the wagon wheel, until she sees her exit. In the vacuum aisle of the superstore she talks to herself, observing the qualities of one device over another, and buys the best vacuum. What else would her daughter like? She picks up a little picture frame, a cinnamon candle.

  For dinner, Janet steams three artichokes and beats butter, eggs, and hot pepper sauce in a bowl. She warms the mixture over the tiny electric stove. Artichokes and hollandaise sauce has been Louise’s favorite meal since she was small. In Kansas, Janet is so busy that she mainly eats cereal and bananas, cold cuts and cheese, shrimp with cocktail sauce. But that is OK. This is the food she likes.

  Janet and Claude get Louise out of bed. The sedatives have made her spacey and somber. Janet and Claude work together quietly, pushing and pulling Louise gently. They act as a team. Janet thinks Claude is holding up well. He goes to the grocery store and picks up around the apartment. He wants to help Louise take a bath before they eat. She hasn’t been washed since the movie premiere—four days ago.

  They slide her off of the bed and her pants bunch, exposing her underwear. “Don’t look!” she says, and Janet almost laughs. The sheets are expensive looking, with large, purple flowers, a gift from Claude’s French mom. The mattress is just a few weeks old, one of Louise and Claude’s joint purchases. Now Louise clings to it. She doesn’t want to go anywhere, she says. Janet and Claude soothe her with promises of warm water and bubbles. Janet feels like she is assisting her grandmother at the nursing home, Louise is that lost, that scared.

  Janet waits on the balcony, watching the water and the cars. She wonders what Claude thinks of her beautiful baby now—helpless, naked, wall-eyed—

  •

  Claude tries to shave Louise’s legs but gives up after a few strokes. She keeps squirming, it is too dangerous. Although lighter in pounds, she is dead weight, he thinks. She is scaring him as she sits in the water with her deep slouch. He is embarrassed to see that her stomach has rolls. She has never smelled like this before, li
ke an animal. She says she wants him to wash her face, but cries when the cleanser hits. She covers her face. Her hair looks like a wig, stiff and rough. Claude spots moles on her body that he has never known about. He gently pushes her head back to get it wet. She resists. She keeps repeating for him to hurry, hurry. Her teeth chatter. Claude can find nowhere to put her but on the toilet seat. He wraps her hair in a towel and guides her into clean underwear, sweatpants, and his college T-shirt.

  At the dinner table, Claude and Janet dip artichoke leaves into yellow sauce and scrape them with their teeth. Louise eats slowly, moving the leaves to her mouth with her one good hand, not talking, concentrating. They eat on a card table Claude and Louise had bought in a box set from a furniture warehouse. The chairs are small and splintery. Claude remembers their first night in this apartment just over one month ago, when Louise arrived. They’d slept on the floor in sleeping bags, all of their boxes still packed around them, a young couple just starting out.

  After they put Louise to bed, Claude wants to read his current events magazine on the living room couch, but Janet is brushing her teeth in the kitchen sink and wearing her nightgown. Claude takes his magazine out to his car. He calls his sister.

  “Why don’t you two watch some TV with each other? Maybe it will take your mind off of things,” she says.

  He holds the phone close to his ear and listens to the voice he has known all his life. He calls his parents and closes his eyes while they talk, his father first, then his mother. Claude is reluctant to hang up. He wants, right now, more than anything, to connect with people who know him from a different part of his life.

  •

  The next morning Janet wakes up to the sound of typing. Claude is a foot away, at the card table, on his laptop. Janet says hello. He quickly logs off and goes to the kitchen, turning his back on her. She carries her plastic bag of toiletries into the bathroom and locks the door.

  Claude goes to work. The day is hot and Janet and Louise spend the entire afternoon inside, watching cars move along the highway. Janet reads a library book aloud. Louise resists anything else.

  The next day Janet sits Louise in front of the computer. “This is a time to pamper ourselves,” Janet says to Louise. They buy items off an online luxury cosmetics site, something Janet has never done before. Janet does not usually wear makeup. She rarely has manicures or pedicures, and thinks acrylic nails are revolting. She said this once out loud at a dinner party, and the hostess held up her hand, fluttering her fake nails.

  When the products arrive they get started right away. The buttery creams smell like frosting and Janet rubs them into the cracks between their fingers and on Louise’s forehead and cheeks. She paints Louise’s toenails a bright red, putting cotton balls between each toe. She does her own, too, but when she gets up to answer the phone, thinking it will be the doctor with an update, she smudges her polish on the carpet. It is not the doctor. She takes all the color off.

  Janet fastens a fresh bra on Louise, moving in a brisk, no-nonsense fashion that signals there is nothing wrong with putting a bra on your daughter. She whistles.

  •

  I mostly cry in the morning, with Claude, when we wake up and remember. It is unsettling to cry with your partner. There is no one to do the job of comforting.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Six days have gone by, and the doctor still has not called. Janet and Claude push Louise’s feet into tennis shoes. It is time for her to get out of the apartment. They will take a field trip to the grocery store.

  Outside in the brightness, the three of them stare down the three flights of stairs that lead to the parking lot. Louise says no way. Claude stands behind Louise and lifts her by her armpits, and Janet stands in front of her, holding her hands and coaching her down each step. It takes a while. Claude sees a woman open her door, look at their progress, and shut it again. A man waits for them to get all the way down before he runs up the stairs two at a time.

  Louise sits in the car while Janet and Claude go in. All Louise wants to eat is potato chips and lemon-lime soda, so that is what they buy.

  •

  The next day, Louise can walk around the apartment a little. She slides her left arm, the good arm, along the wall. Janet is so proud she has to fight off tears. The right side of Louise’s body is drooping a bit. When Louise slips and thuds against the wall, Janet pretends not to see.

  One of Janet’s friends suggests they take up knitting. Knitting is very soothing, she says, and will distract them while they wait for the doctor to call. Janet drives to a crafts store. She buys needles and wool and a book that will teach them how to make a scarf. Louise is agreeable. Janet reads the steps slowly, and Louise moves the needles this way and that. It is difficult with her right hand. The yarn becomes a tangled mess. Louise drops the needles and hides her face in her lap, squeezing her scalp. Janet puts on a movie. They watch it on mute. Any electronic sound is fuzz, her daughter says.

  •

  Claude joins an online baseball team. He stays at his office until late into the night to play. He bets money. He accidentally wakes Janet up when he comes back to the apartment. Janet looks at him harshly but says nothing. He brushes his teeth and feels guilty about what Janet must assume. If she asked him point blank, he might admit that cheating had crossed his mind, but no, of course he never would.

  Claude and Louise still share a bed, a queen-sized. Louise had chosen a headboard but they had not gotten around to buying it yet. When they first moved in together they’d spent a lot of time at the wholesale store. Their membership card was platinum. They’d stared at the hampers of frozen chicken wings, the aluminum trays of Caesar salad, the barrels of mayonnaise. Who would need all that? they’d said to each other. What kind of people needed so much?

  When Claude gets under the covers he feels angry at Louise for being just a body to sleep next to, nothing else, then feels bad for his anger. He tells Louise he loves her, but she must be asleep, because there is no reply.

  •

  Claude, Janet, and Louise go to Butterfly Beach. They sit on the steps of the stairway that leads to the sand. A floppy orange hat hides Louise’s eye patch a little. Claude notices there are many dogs around that their owners can’t control. The dogs bite each other’s throats and the people tug hard on their leashes. He puts his arm around Louise, as if she might run out there.

  Later they drive down the village’s main street. They park the car to people watch. A woman raps on Louise’s window. It’s Danica, a waitress from the Spanish restaurant where Louise used to work nights. Claude’s boss lunches there often. He enjoys the fresh flowers and tasteful cleavage.

  Claude reaches across Louise and cranks open the window. “We all have a card for you,” Danica says. Louise says thank you. “I could swing by and get it sometime,” Claude says.

  “Or me,” says Janet.

  The good will between Janet and Claude is going away. Once, when Claude was sitting in his car late at night, Janet knocked on his window, startling him so much he gave a shout. What are you doing? she’d mouthed.

  Claude remembers how, when he and Louise first started dating in college, they used to take a break from their copy-editing shift to hit golf balls in the parking lot. Louise would wind up for a big swing and often miss the ball completely. Claude always hit his, precise and quick, and the balls would silently float away. They usually had cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. They never tried to find the balls they hit into the darkness. They never gave those balls a second thought.

  Where are you, Louise? he thinks. Are you coming back?

  •

  Janet thinks Claude’s cologne is effeminate. His condiments in the refrigerator are frivolous, his hair products inside the medicine cabinet an embarrassment.

  At the end of the week, they get the call from the hospital. The neurosurgeon says he’s sorry, but he will not perform the surgery. It is too risky, too much could go wrong. Janet protests. “Then where do we go?” she asks. “I d
on’t know,” he says.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Down the street from Claude and Louise’s apartment is an exotic bird shop. A while ago a sign on the door said “Bird Owner’s Brunch Today,” and Claude thought it would be fun to see what that was all about. Claude used to have a thing for birds. The inside was painted pink and the walls were lined with cages full of small shrieking feathered things. Claude wanted to see the back courtyard, where the wire crates were kept on stilts. Bird owners were mingling out there, walking slowly with their pets on their shoulders and juice in their hands. The birds screamed and nipped at each other. Beaks stuck through honeycombed mesh, pecking anyone who stood too close. Muffins, fruit, and bowls of seeds were displayed, buffet style, on a card table that the birds trampled on. Claude stood in the corner, sunglasses on to protect his eyes, while Louise chatted with the owners, watchful for dangerous ones. There were too many out of their cages, Claude thought. Ladies in expensive knits let the birds climb into their sticky hair, using their ears as steps. Heavy gold earrings swung. A tan man in a Hawaiian shirt told Louise to hold out her arms, and together they made a bridge for his parrot to walk across. It bobbed its head as it walked toward Louise, stuck out its tongue, and tasted the tip of her nose. Louise had stood perfectly still. Claude ran up behind her, ready to swat the bird away, but the parrot leaped at him. It snapped Claude’s sunglasses in half.

  Louise had laughed about it for the rest of the day, but Claude felt hurt and cheated by those birds. That wasn’t how it was supposed to go.