Golden State Read Free Page B

blouse, and a red cardigan with gold buttons. A pair of heavy gold bracelets jangled on her wrist.
    I felt suddenly sloppy in my jeans and T-shirt and the unbuttoned, flowing blouse I’d grabbed at the last minute. I lacked what my mother had always had, the ability to dress well without thinking about it. She waved me toward the bone-colored couch. “Sit, I’ve made iced tea.” She refused to let me help her, and I felt like what I was, a visitor in my mother’s house.
    When she went for the tea, I circled the living room. I still couldn’t get over her new place, the white walls, the sterile rooms, the absence of family history. My mother had taken almost no furniture from the house where she had lived with and without my father for forty years. She’d put the photographs away, the framed black-and-whites of my parents’ life in politics: my mother and father with Governor and Mrs. Brown, with Adlai Stevenson, with John F. Kennedy. My father a young man beside Eleanor Roosevelt, who is smiling at him instead of the camera.
    “I miss the old stuff,” I said when my mother returned.
    “God, I don’t,” she replied, putting our iced tea on coasters on the pristine coffee table.
    I looked at my mother. She could have stepped out of a 1940s movie. She was never like the other mothers, nagging, waiting for you to come home. She spoke to five-year-olds as if they were college graduates. As usual, I didn’t know what to say.
    When Sara barged through the door a moment later, I was actually relieved.
    “Man, I don’t know how you do it,” she said to me. “I just can’t do traffic anymore.” She waved her fingers. “All those people in their miniature tanks.” She knitted her brows. “That’s not your car parked outside, is it, Nat?”
    “It’s Eric’s,” I said, repressing the urge to curry favor with her by adding that I still had my same old Honda.
    She looked older than when I’d last seen her. The long, wavy hair she tied behind her neck was now more gray than brown. The lines around her eyes were deeper, the flesh on her neck looser, but her body looked as lithe as it had been in her high school cheerleading days. She wore a short, khaki-colored cotton shift, her legs tanned and muscled, a T-shirt, a bulky sweater, and flip-flops. Only Sara could drive for two and a half hours working the stiff clutch of an old Volvo in those floppy rubber sandals.
    My sister had started college as a sorority girl and finished as an earth mother dishing up brown rice to a houseful of hippies. She graduated, bought a skirt and blouse, and the next thing I knew, she was a social worker with a car and her own apartment overlooking Lake Merritt. Her new life had seemed so glamorous to me that I fantasized about getting a county job of my own when I got out of college.
    After a few years, Sara moved north for a succession of jobs in ever more remote towns, until she settled in Potter Valley. I wasn’t even sure how she lived anymore—whether she worked or not. Sara didn’t like explaining herself any more than she liked getting mired in the quotidian activities that burdened the rest of us.
    “You look good, Natalie,” she said after our embrace. “Prosperous.”
    It was her way of saying I’d gained a few pounds. I tried not to feel hurt. Sara was Sara. She had her nightgown stuffed in a brown paper bag to spend the weekend with our mother.
    We had lunch in the dining room on my mother’s new blond-oak table. She’d divided the contents of the old house among her three children according to a plan that was hers alone. The Oriental rugs, Stickley dining table, and the china went to me, the matching sideboard, the glassware, and Roseville pottery to Sara, the framed etchings to Bobby, who lived alone in a one-room shack without electricity or plumbing.
    Out of old habit, I pressed my thumb against the handle of my fork, but there was no embossed flower to imprint into my flesh. This wasn’t my