Anywhere But Here Read Free Page A

perfect. This was all on the telephone. My mother was the kind of customer a waitress would like to kill.
    We’d each take showers and wash our hair, squeezing lemons on it before the cream rinse. We touched up our fingernails andtoenails with polish. That was only the beginning. Then came the body cream and face cream, our curlers and hair sprays and makeup.
    All along, I had a feeling we couldn’t afford this and that it would be unimaginably bad when we had to pay. I don’t know what I envisioned: nothing, no luck, losing everything, so it was the absolute worst, no money for food, being stopped on a plain cement floor in the sun, unable to move, winding down, stopping like a clock stopped.
    But then it went away again. In our sleeveless summer dresses and white patent leather thongs, we walked to the district of small, expensive shops. There was an exotic pet store we visited every day. We’d been first drawn in by a sign on the window for two defumed skunks.
    “But you can never really get the smell completely out,” the blond man inside had told us. He showed us a baby raccoon and we watched it lick its paws, with movements like a cat but more delicate, intricate features.
    More than anything, I wanted that raccoon. And my mother wasn’t saying no. We didn’t have to make any decisions until we left the Luau. And we didn’t know yet when that would be.
    In a china store, my mother held up a plain white plate. “Look at this. See how fine it is?” If she hadn’t said that, I wouldn’t have noticed anything, but now I saw that it was thin and there was a pearliness, like a film of water, over the surface.
    “Granny had a whole
set
like this.” She turned the plate upside down and read the fine printing. “Yup, this is it. Spode.”
    I remembered Granny almost bald, carrying oats and water across the yard to feed Hal’s pony. But still, I didn’t know.
    “Mmhmm. You don’t know, but Granny was very elegant. Gramma isn’t, she could be, but she isn’t. We’re like Granny. See, we belong here, Pooh-bear-cub. We come from this.”
    I didn’t know.
    A week after the accident, we had good news. The bill for our car was far less than we’d thought and my mother paid ninety dollars,off the record, to fix the other woman’s fender. They both agreed not to contact insurance companies.
    This was all great except it meant we were leaving. The car would be ready in a day. My mother sat on the edge of the bed, filing her nails, when she put down the telephone receiver, gently. “There’s still a few things I’d like to see here,” she said.
    We went out to the pool and tried not to think. It seemed easy, lying on towels over warm cement. I’d gotten tan, very dark, the week we’d been there. My mother had freckles and pink burns on her cheeks and shoulders, and her hair was streaked lighter from the sun. That day, my mother got up and went inside before I did. She had to be careful in the sun.
    I was in the pool, holding on to the side, kicking my legs in the water behind me. I was worried about my knees. Lately, I’d noticed they were fat, not knobby and horselike, the way my mother’s were. So I was doing kicks to improve them. Around the pool, other women slouched in deck chairs. I thought about my knees again. At least tan fat looked better than white fat, I was thinking.
    Then my mother called me. “We’re going to see a house,” she said, shoving a towel into my hand. “Hurry up and jump in the shower.”
    We waited, clean and dressed, outside the Luau. My mother told me that a real estate agent named Gail was picking us up. There was something in her tone, she didn’t want to explain. So I went along with it as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. And there in Scottsdale, it really wasn’t. It had been so long since anything was regular.
    Suddenly, Gail was there and she honked. I climbed into the backseat and my mother sat next to her in front. They talked quickly, getting to know each