Julia and the Art of Practical Travel Read online

  I climbed the front stairs and walked into the house. By now my heart was practically pounding in my throat. It sounded weird to me that my mother would be having a nap in the kitchen of all places, but everything about this place was weird. A crashing noise from the living room made me jump straight up into the air: a naked little boy stood there all by himself, just picking up a book and dropping it on the floor, over and over again. And then in the next room a man sat on the floor, playing some sort of twangy instrument that sounded to me like a cat yowling out in an alley. I realized that he wasn’t wearing any clothes either, but this time Aunt Constance wasn’t there to cover my eyes like she did when we saw that naked lady in Greenwich Village. I ran toward the back of the house and found myself in a grimy kitchen. A mattress lay in the middle of the floor. And on that mattress slept two women, one with her back to me. She had orangey hair like Aunt Constance, but she looked too skinny to be my mother.

  Mother, I called out.

  The woman didn’t stir. I walked over and gave her shoulder a little shake.

  Mother, is that you? I said.

  The woman moved a little and sat up very slowly and groaned, her hair covering her face. She moved the curtain of hair away and stared at me with half-opened eyes. Then she gave a little smile.

  Well, hello, Julia, she said, and her voice sounded like it had gravel in it. Where did you come from?

  I didn’t move a muscle.

  Is Constance with you too? my mother asked blearily, looking over my shoulder.

  I’m by myself, I told her.

  Good, she said. My head is pounding. I couldn’t handle Constance right now. What time is it?

  It’s five o’clock, I said, still not moving an inch.

  In the morning or afternoon? she yawned.

  It seemed pretty obvious to me that it was in the afternoon and I started to get mad instead of nervous.

  It’s daytime, Mother, I snapped.

  She stretched and patted the mattress next to her.

  Come sit with me, she said. And call me Rosemary. I hate the word mother.

  Why? I asked. You are my mother.

  Mother is just so stiff, she said. And it makes me feel old. Come here, little sister. She patted the mattress.

  I don’t want to, I yelled. And I’m your daughter, not your sister. Aunt Constance is your sister. You’re my mother.

  She acted like she didn’t even hear me. She glanced down at the other woman on the mattress, still sound asleep.

  Oh, are you worried about her? my mother asked. That’s Indigo. She’s cool. She’s just sleeping off a bad trip.

  I looked hard at my mother and it really was like looking in the mirror, except her face looked oily and her eyes were puffy and she was all skin and bones and hard angles. And I realized that the last time I’d seen her was in the dining room at Windy Ridge, surrounded by our blue-and-white china and velvet curtains, and now here she was sitting on a dirty kitchen floor, looking like she’d never even heard of a bathtub. And even worse, she was acting like none of this was strange at all, like she had seen me yesterday instead of years ago. I wanted answers, and suddenly my voice sounded almost screechy when I demanded:

  Why did you leave us?

  Oh, you’re being such a pill, she said. Don’t start off by picking a fight. Come over here and sit with me for a minute. Let’s just be together. Leave all that Windy Ridge stuff behind. Just be with me in the here and now.

  I don’t want to just sit there and be, I told her, my voice rising. Why are you here? Who are these people?

  My mother blinked at me.

  They are my family, she said.

  No, they’re not, I shouted. I am your family. And Aunt Constance too.

  Well, this is my adopted family, she told me. My spiritual family. We all live together, love together, work together, and feed each other. I didn’t know you’d gotten so grown-up, little sister. You should be with us here. Learn a new way of living.

  Just then I heard the front door slap shut, and footsteps thundered through the house toward the kitchen. A moment later Aunt Constance almost tumbled into the room, her face bright red.

  Julia—thank heavens, she cried. Come over here this instant.

  Oh, stop being so hysterical, you biddy, my mother said. Then she stared at Aunt Constance’s throat and narrowed her eyes.

  What necklace is that? she asked, and her voice suddenly lost that fake, dreamy lilt.

  The pearls Mother gave me when I graduated from Miss Horton’s, said Aunt Constance, covering her neck with her hand.

  They’re fake, my mother snorted. You can tell that from a mile away.

  Come to me, Julia, said Aunt Constance. We’re leaving at once.

  That’s right, Constance, called my mother, standing up unsteadily. Take her back east and make her into a Barbie doll. Are you sending her to Miss Horton’s when you get back? Maybe turn her into a silly, stunted old maid, like yourself?

  Don’t be mean to Aunt Constance, I cried.

  My mother stretched her hand out to me.

  Come to me, little sister, she said. You can come live with us here, and learn what life is really about.

  I wouldn’t live here if you paid me all the money in the world, I shouted at her suddenly. All you talk about is loving everything, but you left me behind. What kind of love is that? You’d rather be here with all of these creepy, dirty people than with us.

  You know what? my mother said. You’re just as uptight as poor, sad, old Constance here. You’re a little, uptight Lancaster too. Go on, then. Go back to Windy Ridge. Both of you.

  She lay down on the mattress again and turned her back to us.

  That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say? I yelled.

  Beat it, she said, her back still turned. You’re no little sister of mine.

  Then I burst into tears.

  I don’t remember leaving that awful kitchen.

  I don’t remember leaving the house at 1468 Haight Street.

  I don’t remember getting into a taxi with Aunt Constance.

  What I do remember: being in the back of that taxi with my eyes burning from crying so much, my head in Aunt Constance’s lap. She was petting my hair. I remember that.

  I’m sorry I did that, Aunt Constance, I said into her lap. And then I told her that she had been right, and I tried to stop crying but the tears kept coming anyway.

  Aunt Constance just kept stroking my hair quietly. She didn’t even scold me for disobeying and stealing and running away. Instead she looked out the window at the Haight and this strange world that we didn’t belong to and where we were leaving my mother behind.

  It’s just you and me now, Julia, she finally said. Just the two of us. All of the other Lancasters are gone.

  The first thing that happens when you arrive at Miss Horton’s School: the headmistress will sit you down and tell you how lucky you are to be there. After all, many famous ladies have gone to Miss Horton’s over the last hundred years, she will say. Then she’ll reel off about a dozen names that you’re supposed to know but probably don’t unless you sit at home reading your mother’s copy of Vogue magazine. I doubt that my mother has been reading Vogue magazine out there in her dirty commune in Haight-Ashbury. Aunt Constance certainly never read it. So I barely knew anyone on the headmistress’s list, but I nodded anyway and tried to look very impressed, since that’s what the headmistress clearly expected.

  Aunt Constance was there for that part of the talk, and while she was there, the headmistress was sugar-and-pie nice to me. I had turned twelve on our drive back from San Francisco, which meant that Miss Horton’s could now take me as a student and have another Lancaster on its roster. The headmistress made a big fuss about how much she admired our family, but the moment Aunt Constance left for her hotel in New York City and drove away in our Windy Ridge car, which still had all of our practical-travel things in it, the headmistress let her smile fade away, and she turned to me and said:

  I
can hardly believe that you’re a Lancaster. You look a little wild around the eyes to me. We clearly have our work cut out for us here.

  The next thing that happens to you at Miss Horton’s: they make you put away the clothes you arrived in, and then you get a uniform. There’s a little plaid skirt with suspenders and a white shirt with a round collar and white socks that go up to your knees.

  And after that, they put you in a dorm room with another girl, a stranger from Connecticut who asks to be called Muffy. Then Muffy tells you that her horse is called Mittens and that her charm bracelet has eleven charms from Tiffany & Co. on it. I told her that I was the deputy sheriff of Gold Point, a ghost town in Nevada, and that the only jewelry I owned was a pearl necklace that my hippie mother had once flung into a bush. She just looked at me funny when I said these things, and then she drew a line down the middle of our room with chalk.

  Stay on your side, she warned me.

  There were lots of rules to remember at Miss Horton’s. You always had to be someplace at a specific time, and it was very hard for me to keep track. The headmistress gave me a schedule and there was always a bell going off, and you were supposed to run off to the next classroom or to a dining hall or to a gymnasium, where you’d have to put on another uniform and run around a field, but I was always in the wrong place at the wrong time, and most of the teachers yelled at me and told me that I was a troublemaker.

  Two other things that happened when I got there:

  1. They took away my Brownie camera and said they would keep it stored until the summer break. The headmistress said this was because I was making the other girls at Miss Horton’s uncomfortable with all of my picture taking, but the last straw was when I took a picture of a dissected frog in our biology class to send to Jack to remind her of our frog-leg feast on the Paw Paw creek bank:

  The biology teacher got upset and said that it was macabre of me to do that. I didn’t know what macabre meant, but apparently it was bad enough that they take away your camera.

  2. One night it got really hot and stuffy inside our room because it was Indian summer, and Muffy wouldn’t let me open the window, which was on her side of the chalk line, so I left the room and climbed up an ivy trellis to the dorm’s roof and brought with me a bunch of postcards and a pen. I wrote a card to Belfry and one to Sheriff Stone, and it was so cool up there in the inky blackness with the stars overhead that I fell asleep. And then when I woke up, it was morning and there was a fire engine parked on the lawn below. A fireman was climbing up a ladder to the roof. He crawled over to me, picked me up, and carried me down the ladder with him, even though I told him that it was just as easy to go down the ivy trellis and offered to show him how. All of the girls from my dorm stood in a circle at the bottom of the ladder, but none of them would talk to me.

  The headmistress, on the other hand, talked to me a lot that day: I had to sit in her office while she telephoned Aunt Constance, who was staying someplace in New York City called the Barbizon Hotel for Women. And when they were done talking, the headmistress told me that I could stay at Miss Horton’s, but she didn’t seem very happy about it. She confiscated my postcards to Belfry and Sheriff Stone.

  It is utterly inappropriate for a twelve-year-old girl to be corresponding with men, she told me, and ripped the cards to shreds.

  Worst of all: I couldn’t find a single porch on the whole campus to sit under when I wanted to be alone. So I was stuck in that room with Muffy and her pictures of Mittens the horse and her Tiffany & Co. bracelet, and I never felt farther away from myself in my life.

  There was only one thing that wasn’t bad about Miss Horton’s, and that was Miss Ellison. She taught English and gave us good books to read, and soon I discovered that a good book is the next best thing after a porch to hide under. You couldn’t hide yourself inside a book, of course, but you could at least disappear into it in a different way, and sometimes the book would be good enough to make you forget for a few hours that you were at Miss Horton’s. Miss Ellison never once called me a troublemaker and one day she asked me to stay after class to have a talk with her.

  Julia, she said. What happened to your arms? They’re covered in little bruises.

  I told her that some of the older girls liked to pinch me when no one else was looking.

  Miss Ellison looked horrified and asked me why. I told her that I didn’t know, but that the pinching had started one day after history class when we were studying Texas and the Alamo and I told the class about World’s End Ranch, with all of its Chinese cowboys and javelina. Now some of the girls from the class called me a freak and a liar, and sometimes they would even leave things like bugs and worms in my bed at night.

  That’s awful, said Miss Ellison. Why haven’t you said anything?

  I told her that the headmistress hated me anyway, so there was no point. And anyway, I said, Christmas was coming in a few weeks, and I’d be going to New York City to stay with Aunt Constance at the Barbizon Hotel and the bruises would heal up then.

  Come with me, Julia, said Miss Ellison, and for a minute I was worried that she might be taking me to the headmistress’s office. But instead we walked off the Miss Horton’s campus and into town, where there was a tea parlor. Miss Ellison ordered English breakfast tea, and when I asked the waitress for a pot of Lapsang souchong tea—Grandmother’s favorite—the waitress did a double take and said she’d never heard of it. So I settled for English breakfast too, and Miss Ellison sat back in her chair and looked at me for a long time.

  Tell me about yourself, Julia, she said finally. I can tell that you’ve probably come from a very interesting background. You seem to know about such a huge array of unlikely things. I’ve taught at Miss Horton’s for twenty years and I’ve never known another young woman like you.

  She had a kind look on her face when she said this, so I knew she didn’t mean it as an insult. I told her about growing up at Windy Ridge and my mother becoming a runaway hippie and how we went looking for her in our car and about everything that happened on the trip. At first Miss Ellison looked like she couldn’t decide if I was making it all up, especially during the parts about the monkey at Tipsy Lipps’s party and about the chicken foot and the voodoo houses in New Orleans. But by the time I got to World’s End and then the part about Gold Point, she leaned forward in her chair and listened so hard, I don’t even think that she remembered to blink her eyes. And then, when I told her what happened when we got to San Francisco and found my mother living on a mattress on a kitchen floor in a house filled with naked, dirty people, Miss Ellison put her hands over her mouth and stared at me in horror.

  I got embarrassed then and stopped talking. Both of our pots of tea were empty and out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the waitress had been standing behind the counter listening to me too while she was pretending to wash cups.

  When Miss Ellison was ready to talk again, she asked me: Why did your aunt bring you to Miss Horton’s after all of this?

  Because women in my family have been going to Miss Horton’s for generations, I told her. And anyway, we leftover Lancasters don’t have a home anymore. Aunt Constance said that she didn’t know what else to do with me. She doesn’t have a lot of money left, and Miss Horton’s gave me a scholarship because I’m a Lancaster.

  Miss Ellison didn’t say anything.

  And, I went on, Aunt Constance said I’d be safe here.

  We walked slowly back to Miss Horton’s. When we got back to the campus, I turned up the path to go back to my dorm room with the chalk line down the middle, but Miss Ellison made me follow her to the headmistress’s office instead. I sat outside the office by myself while Miss Ellison and the headmistress had a long talk inside. Then they called me in when they were done.

  Julia, said Miss Ellison. We think that for the rest of the semester, you should move out of your dorm room. I would like for you to come and live with me in my little house on the edge of campus.

  Oh, I said warily. Why?

 
We just think you need a little extra attention, she told me. And frankly, I think you need a little kindness.

  No, she corrected herself. A lot of kindness.

  I didn’t know what to say. It was quiet for a minute until Miss Ellison added:

  If you need further convincing, you should know that I can play gin—and hearts and spades. Maybe not as well as your grandmother or Aunt Constance, but passably well. And I have always wanted to learn more about voodoo. So what do you say?

  When I got back to my dorm room later that afternoon, I couldn’t pack my bags fast enough.

  Miss Ellison had given me a nice room with white curtains and a window that looked into the branches of a tulip tree, which looked especially pretty when it was covered with winter snow and icicles. Miss Ellison also made very good banana bread and carrot cake, and she got my Brownie camera back from the headmistress and didn’t seem to mind how many pictures I took. She even gave me a little mechanical bird in a cage to keep me company.

  The cloud-over-sun feeling faded a little while I was living at Miss Ellison’s, but I also didn’t let myself get too comfy because I knew I couldn’t stay there forever. I still didn’t have a real home like all of the other girls here did.

  On the last day of the semester, just before Christmas vacation, a lot of parents drove to Miss Horton’s to pick up their daughters and take them home. Some parents just sent big black limousines driven by chauffeurs to pick them up. On the last day before vacation, one of the girls asked me during math class:

  Is your boyfriend Sheriff Stone going to be sending a horse by to pick you up?

  The other girls in the class snickered.

  Aunt Constance came to get me instead. Our Windy Ridge car looked very different when it didn’t have trunks and silver candlesticks and carpets stuffed inside it and tied to the top. Aunt Constance had swapped out her summery straw hat and flowered dress for one of Grandmother’s old fur hats and the mink coat we’d used as a blanket in the Texas desert.